Handling constructive criticism

[Bill Baxter]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> "Bill Baxter" <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote in message 
> news:fu5u61$1m4u$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 
>>> I surrendered long ago. I can't even be bothered reading those post you
>>> talk of now. Nothing will come of them. Walter won't change. D will 
>>> fester
>>> on for a while but all the good things that it could have been will not 
>>> see
>>> light of day. D is already lot better than the alternatives and that 
>>> seems
>>> to be good enough for Walter. Mediocracy rules. There is no desire to aim
>>> higher.
>> The current problem seems to be the opposite to me.  The problem *is* that 
>> Walter doesn't think D is good enough, and so he think he needs to add 
>> ingredient C to woo large-systems developers or ingredient P to try to 
>> leap ahead of the competition.  If anything he's aiming too high, into 
>> territory that no one knows anything about, and which may pan out to be 
>> ultimately not so useful.  Or it may pan out to be fantastic.  I don't 
>> think anyone knows.
> 
> I'm sure this is what you're getting at, but it's both.  Because W keeps 
> adding feature C (lots, and lots, of feature C.  forever.) and thinks about 
> feature P, feature M, and feature T don't get any love and so fall into 
> decay.

Yeh, that sums it up nicely.

> It'd be great if development on featured C and P just _STOPPED_ for once and 
> if we could get some other features working _properly_.  You can't build a 
> house in a tidal zone without a hell of a foundataion. 

I think he's /trying/ to balance the two.  Maybe the balance isn't 
falling in the right place, but every release does have some number of 
bug fixes.  And he does listen to pleas for help over bugs that are 
truly blockers for actual development.

I was really happy to see some progress being made on making structs 
smarter in the last D2 release.  Also, someone noticed that a 
description of opDot is now checked into the documentation repo.  Most 
of my serious troubles in porting C++ libraries to D has come from D's 
wussy structs.

I agree that it's sad that various features with good potential have 
fallen by the way-side, but on the other hand, strategically it makes 
sense to me to focus on issues that will have the biggest impact on how 
people write libraries.  Const and smarter structs are probably the two 
that will have the biggest impact.  So it makes sense to try to get 
those two settled as fast as possible.

--bb