Reminds me of?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 11:36 AM, Don<nospam at nospam.com> wrote:
> Steve Teale wrote:
>>
>> To the D Faithful:
>>
>> In recent postings, I have increasingly seen  references to the 'Select
>> Few'.
>
>>
>> This kind of reminds me of Iran, where you have 'The Guardian Council',
>> and 'The Supreme Leader'.
>
> The similarities are pretty weak, I'd say.
> Who ARE the 'Select Few'? There's two possibilities people could be talking
> about:
> (a) the people who meet weekly with Walter in a coffee shop and discuss D;
> or (b) those with write access to Phobos and druntime.
>
> To be part of (a), you need to live in Seattle.
> To be part of (b), you need to provide a few good-quality patches in
> Bugzilla.
>
> I don't think there's anything more to it than that. I think people are
> imagining some secret society that doesn't actually exist.

I don't speak for anyone else but when I see "the select few" I think
of (a).  As in, that seems to be where the majority of important
design discussions take place, and the rest of the community isn't
privy to it (except when one of the Big Three posts something on
Reddit about the outcomes of said discussions).

The frustrating thing about the design process of D is that it is, for
all intents and purposes, a black box.  Community gives input, random
other things come out with no advance indication.  How it works is a
mystery.  Maybe being at the coffeehouse doesn't really change that, I
don't know.  Maybe there _isn't_ any kind of plan or direction.  Maybe
it's not that the design process is opaque, but simply nonexistent.
Don't you think it's more than a little irksome when a couple of
popular C++ developers come along and have more influence on the
design of D than a community of dozens of hackers who have been
(ab)using it for years?