The state of string interpolation...one year later

Nicholas Wilson iamthewilsonator at hotmail.com
Mon Mar 18 00:59:11 UTC 2019


On Sunday, 17 March 2019 at 16:50:13 UTC, Jonathan Marler wrote:
> On Sunday, 17 March 2019 at 14:20:20 UTC, Rubn wrote:
>> Seems you've done everything but write a DIP, I don't really 
>> see why this feature should be exempt from the process. Even 
>> if the process isn't the greatest, that isn't reason enough 
>> for it to circumvent it.
>
> I'll have to disagree with you here. I'm not sure if you've 
> written a DIP but I have.
>
> I started DIP 1011 about 2 years ago.  After about a year, it 
> was forwarded to W&A and I got a response from Andrei that 
> contained a fair number of errors.  To me it seemed that he 
> didn't take enough time to read/understand the proposal (I've 
> heard this isn't the first time this has happened). The 
> proposal itself is pretty simple, but the ramifications of the 
> change weren't so clear.  A discussion between the leadership 
> and the points they had questions about would have been very 
> helpful early on to know where to put effort into researching 
> the proposal.  However, that's not how the DIP process is 
> written to work.  After Andrei's response I attempted to 
> discuss their concerns but everything was filtered through the 
> DIP manager Michael Parker and they never responded to my 
> comments and questions.  We left off with them providing an 
> example library implementation asking me to comment on it. I 
> did so, explaining that their example was incorrect and had 
> little bearing on the DIP itself as they had implemented 
> different semantics than what the DIP was proposing, but then 
> they never responded.  That was about a year ago, and the DIP 
> is still considered to be in "Formal Review".

That does smack of my experience with DIP1016. I've added DIP1011 
to the list of DIP related stuff for the dconf AGM[1]

> In my opinion the DIP process is broken.  I don't want to 
> introduce a potentially good feature for D into a system where 
> I believe it will actually harm the chances for the feature 
> rather then help them.  If the process is fixed however, I will 
> gladly create a DIP and would look forward to really hashing 
> out the feature and seeing how it could best be implemented.

I hope to get the DIP process fixed at the AGM, but for making 
progress on the topic of interpolated strings it would really 
help if you have a draft (or steal/polish that one from the DIP 
PR queue) so that we have something concrete to discuss (i.e. get 
(part of) a community round done).

> I believe if I use the current DIP system as it exists to 
> introduce it, it will actually make it more likely to fail than 
> if I didn't write a DIP at all at this point.
>
> Please understand, I don't shy away from good, robust work and 
> research.  I'm a highly motivated mathematician, who loves 
> optimizing and finding elegant solutions.  That's what I like 
> spending my time on.  Researching language proposals is exactly 
> the type of work I like to do. I spend alot of time reading and 
> researching other languages and the features they bring to the 
> table. I would very much enjoy contributing to a DIP process 
> that fosters collaboration and feedback that results in more 
> consensus and communal understanding.

This really does highlight the problems with organisation we 
really want to be getting all the best work you can provide and 
if that is bottlenecked on the current DIP process then we 
definitely need to look at why it is and how to fix it.

[1]: http://dconf.org/2019/talks/agm.html


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