Clojure and Pull Request Controversy

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Thursday, 29 November 2018 at 13:48:43 UTC, welkam wrote:
> On Thursday, 29 November 2018 at 10:14:37 UTC, Chris wrote:
>>
>> You do realize that autodecode is an old flaw that has to go 
>> sooner or later. It negatively affects string handling 
>> performance, is not even correct and is a deal breaker in a 
>> world where string handling is omnipresent.
>
> Its a flaw but I wouldn't call it a deal breaker. If you want 
> performance you will pay attention to details and you will see 
> where autodecode happens and you can fix that.
>
> Now Walter has asked you twice what are you proposing to do 
> about autodecode that doesnt SILENTLY break existing code. 
> Walter is a guy that doesnt like to be verbose and tries to 
> express himself with as few words as possible. If we expand his 
> one sentence we would get something like this.
>
> I agree with you that autodecode is a problem and its a feature 
> that appeared to be good on idea level. Now that its clear that 
> it is a problem we thought hard on possible solutions to this 
> problem and we didnt found satisfactory solution. Its possible 
> that our limited brains could not have thought all 
> possibilities and you might have a key to solving this problem 
> once and for all so with that hope I ask you what are you 
> proposing?
>
> And to this you respond with
>
>> And reasonable paths to fix it have been proposed.
>
> What path? When proposed? Where can I read about them? And of 
> those paths which one do you prefer? If you wrote one more 
> vague statement like this a cute animal will die. Like this one 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18-xvIjH8T4&t=20
>
>> I'd suggest something like the "D labs" for it where you can 
>> test all those great new ideas and features for a minimum of 
>> one year.
>
> You mean something like DIP? As a person who is so critical of 
> everything you seem to know remarkably low on how D sausage is 
> made. That came out wrong...

Haha! That's a good one, puts reddit to shame really.

Anyway back on topic...

I think deprecating the auto decoding free functions with a 
message to use `.byChar`, `.byDchar`,`.representation` etc. is 
really the _only_ practical way forward on this. Yes its slow but 
it won't cause any breakage. Certainly not silent breakage, 
deprecation being rather noisy.