Generality creep

Manu turkeyman at gmail.com
Thu Apr 4 06:18:57 UTC 2019


On Wed, Apr 3, 2019 at 9:25 PM Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
<digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

You say your original design worked how I suggest (I'm not surprised,
it's the only thing that makes sense), so... close the circuit!
Maybe it was a success, and nobody ever had the chance to demonstrate
it. We've waited so long to try it, so let us try it out!


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