D : Not for me anymore

[Bill Baxter]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> Kristian wrote:
>>> So maybe we should have contents on APIs first. When we got the base  
>>> structure right, we can make competitions on parts (e.g. functions,  
>>> classes) that should be efficient, or hard to implement. Bulk 
>>> (trivial)  stuff can be implemented outside the competitions later. 
>>> Also, API  implementations should include documentation.
>>
>> I think an API competition should definitely be in two stages:
>>
>>  - compete on the most useful and best spec
>>  - then compete on the most elegant implementations of the winning spec

I see two more stages preceding your two:
   -- gather proposals for cool and useful libraries & pick one
   -- gathering requirements for selected proposals (nothing formal, 
just  discussion on the list to see what people who might use it want 
out of it, like "I want to be able to connect gui fields to a database 
backend")

> Design, then code, is the development approach that everyone advocates. 
> It's also the approach nobody uses <g>. Design/code/design/code... 
> iteratively is the real process. There's a good reason for that - too 
> often when implementing a design we discover that the design won't work 
> or could at least be improved.

So in that case, just don't require that people stick to the spec in 
stage 2.  The spec competition gets the ideas out there, and gives the 
community a chance to give feedback on them.  If the process is any good 
then the writer of the implementation will need pretty darn good 
justification for diverging from the spec.  Otherwise people will just 
say "the spec's way was better".

Sounds cool.  But it seems like a huge waste of coding talent to have 
everyone concentrate on one particular library and then throw away N-1 
out of N of the implementations resulting.  Why not get the list of 
proposals then say the competition is just to come up with an 
implementation of the best and most useful thing on that list, period.

Regardless of who wins, the range and variety of code that gets written 
that way will likely exceed that from a race-to-write-lib-x competition.

--bb