Generality creep

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Thursday, 4 April 2019 at 11:10:09 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 4/4/19 1:50 AM, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
>> e.g. DIP1000 was bad, not because it was iterated upon to fix 
>> the holes in it, but because the changes were not communicated 
>> properly and not documented. I suggest we don't make those 
>> same mistakes again.
>
> DIP1000 is actually an example of second-order thinking. Walter 
> pored over it for months before writing and implementing it.

That is was a good idea does not excuse how sloppily the 
procedure of implementation was handled. I note also that it 
underwent significant changes post implementation. That is the 
iteration I'm taking about (just handled better, i.e. docs & 
community engagement).

> Incrementalism is an anti-pattern in language design.

I'm talking about design iteration, not language by incremental 
feature addition.
Incremental feature addition is difficult, if not impossible, to 
undo if it turns out it was a bad idea. Iterative design, by 
definition, does not suffer from that problem.