Is there an intention to 'finish' D2?

Ola Fosheim Grøstad ola.fosheim.grostad at gmail.com
Sun Nov 21 17:00:43 UTC 2021


On Sunday, 21 November 2021 at 16:24:58 UTC, Dukc wrote:
> Sure, forums don't filter out people who aren't already 
> committed like conferences tend to do. But also: sampling forum 
> complainers has its own biases, they tend to be those of the 
> inpatient and furious nature.

Absolutely. I agree. You cannot take their anger in itself as a 
need for changing the product. You can try to find out what the 
source of their anger is. It could for instance be a 
communication problem and not a product problem.

But if 30 people independently say that the Boehm-like GC is 
preventing them from becoming enthusiatic about the language, and 
that they therefore are limited to dabbling with it. Then you 
also should think that there is a rather large number of people 
that don't come to the forum and feel the same way. Does this 
mean not having a GC is the right resolution? Of course not. But 
it suggests that you might have greater enthusiasm in a greater 
proportion of your user base if you find a better solution for 
compiler backed memory management. And make that a priority.

People will not build a framework until they feel that the tool 
is solid (for their use case), until then they will dabble with a 
wait-and-see attitude.

> Conference people have usually had to consider the limits of 
> time/manpower/influence when pushing for changes. Forum 
> complainers often have not.

Maybe. You should of course not accept the solution the 
complainers present, since it might cause other problems. But if 
it is a repeating pattern, then you should make it a priority to 
find a solution that create enthusiasm. By collecting many 
solution proposal (not a random DIP from a random user) you can 
get an idea of what options exists and can try to find synergies 
in the design space.

In essence I don't think the users should design the language. I 
think the designers should design the language. I think the 
designers should collect ideas from outside, then design 
something that makes the language become something clean and 
beautiful as a whole (rather than a mix of 100 different 
aesthetics from 100 different users)

> Do you think listening to the forum complainers paints a less 
> distorted picture nonetheless, compared to people one meets at 
> conferences? And if, what makes you think so?

The most enthusiastic users may not be able to lift up those 
issues that make other users less enthusiastic. The most 
enthusiastic users are likely to grow the complexity of the 
language if you were to accept all individual features they 
present. Each feature might be great, but not fit well with 
everything else.

The users that are enthusiastic are already productive. Do you 
want to prioritize that one group more productive? Or do you want 
to increase the number of well supported use cases by covering 
the needs of the less enthusiastic users?

Do you want to evolve the design into a corner that the most 
enthusiastic crowd is in? Or do you want to find a wider sense of 
common ground?

For instance, we now have many non-system-level programmers. We 
need to preserve their use case, absolutely! So we have to look 
for common ground with hardcore system level programmers. That is 
a challenge, but possible (I think). But I don't think that 
resolution will come from any individual user who is scratching 
his own itch. It has to come from a designer (or a user that is 
empathic to many different uses cases) that look for common 
ground and synergies in the design space.

Are we on the same page?



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