Generality creep

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Thu Apr 4 04:24:23 UTC 2019


On 4/3/19 11:09 PM, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
> On Thursday, 4 April 2019 at 02:05:15 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 3/31/19 6:25 PM, Manu wrote:
>>> Sure. But in the meantime, fix the objective bug with the current
>>> semantics where you can read/write un-protected data freely. Right
>>> now. Please for the love of god
>>
>> This does not work as a two stages process, though the "stop the 
>> bleeding first then come with the new solution" metaphor seems 
>> attractive. The main issues being when we break code that people got 
>> to work, we need to offer the alternative as well. Another being that 
>> the exact kind of things we disable/enable may be dependent on the 
>> ultimate solution.
> 
> Well whatever happens I'll be gobsmacked if its not behind an opt in 
> switch.
> With that in mind, if Manu gets use out of the stopgap of disabling 
> read/write access, then I think we should implement that ASAP and then 
> listen to whatever he complains about next ;)
> 
>> This would be a large effort requiring a strong team. Walter, 
>> yourself, and I would be helpful participants but I think between the 
>> three of us we don't have the theoretical chops to pull this off. At 
>> least I know I don't. We need the likes of Timon Gehr, Johan Engelen, 
>> and David Nadlinger (whom I cc'd just in case).
> 
> I don't think we are going to be able to do this without iterating on 
> the design and closing holes and nuisances that we discover. I'm not 
> saying that it is a bad idea to design up front as much as we can, but 
> we shouldn't wast time getting hung up on design when implementation can 
> give gains to users and guidance to the design.

I don't think this works for programming language design. In fact I'm 
positive it doesn't. It's the way we've done things so far.



More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list