Any chance to call Tango as Extended Standard Library

[John Reimer]

Hello Don,

> dsimcha wrote:
> 
>> == Quote from Don (nospam at nospam.com)'s article
>> 
>>> <small rant>
>>> I completely disagree. I think the two libraries is a disaster. I
>>> can
>>> see that so many people have been exposed to a lifetime of
>>> propaganda
>>> that "competition is a good thing", but it's just propaganda.
>>> Competition inevitably means wasted effort, and it's obvious in D.
>>> </small rant>
>> On a purely philosopical note, yes, cooperation is better than
>> competition *if* there's enough of a consensus among the parties
>> involved as to how things should be run.  However, this is a *BIG*
>> if.  The problem with ideologies that are strongly against
>> competition is that this is very seldom true in the real world.
>> (Phobos vs. Tango is one example)  In these cases, where there is
>> simply no consensus, the only realistic alternative to competition is
>> to have winners and losers picked in a dictatorial fashion by some
>> form of authority.  Yes, this authority could be selected
>> democratically by voting, but tyranny of the majority is still
>> tyranny.  In the case of Phobos vs. Tango, Walter could
>> hypothetically just try his absolute hardest to kill off Tango, in
>> the name of preventing competition, but I'm sure noone wants that.
>> Therefore, where no true consensus exists or ever realistically will
>> exist, competition is often a lesser evil than having a winner
>> arbitrarily picked by some form of authority.
>> 
> I'm not convinced that there really is a major idealogical difference
> between Phobos and Tango. At the time Tango was formed, Phobos was
> virtually stagnant. It was a random accretion of contributions by
> various authors from various points in D's history. All changes to
> Phobos were manually made by Walter, who had too much on his plate
> already. _Nobody_ thought that that situation was ideal.
> 
> Tango1 is in direct competition with Phobos1, but Phobos1 is frozen.
> Phobos2 is _not_ the same as Phobos1, and breaks compatibility with it
> in many serious ways. And Phobos1 and 2 are likely to diverge even
> more with time.
> 
> There are in fact many similarities between Phobos2 and Tango1.
> 
> Now we're getting some genuinely different approaches between Phobos2
> and Tango1, but they seem to be driven as much by the new capabilities
> in D2, as by philosophical differences. So I see two critical
> questions:
> (1) to what extent will Tango2 embrace D2 features, at the expense of
> backward compatibility with Tango1? (The more it embraces D2, the
> closer
> it will become to Phobos2); and
> (2) are both libraries prepared to eliminate the many superficial
> differences between them?
> Can we merge Tango2 and Phobos2, given that neither of them completely
> exist yet?
> 


I agree that these are the critical questions, and we will need to see them 
answered eventually.  The question is "when?"   I suppose, the Tango people 
probably can't answer that until they see a stable D 2.0 and a complete Phobos 
2.  On the other hand, perhaps its a very good time for Tango guys to be 
introduced to the Phobos 2 floor plan so that both sides can see if their 
goals can merge somehow.


-JJR