properties

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

bearophile wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>>> Maybe community should decide in poll who's arguments are better?
>> That would be helpful.
> 
> Designing a language with polls is an obvious idea, but I have not suggested it in the past because it has some drawbacks too (there's a risk of losing the coherence of the language and to use "political" solutions that are mostly good to close the muzzle of the majority of people).
> 
> On the other hand it has some advantages too (example: despite you are intelligent, some names and function/templates signatures you have added to Phobos may be not good because you aren't equal to the average person, everyone has some personal quirks. So designing by poll helps remove such quirks).
> 
> So this time, as an experiment, we may try to see what happens using a poll :-)
> Language design polls must be not anonymous, each vote must have a name beside it.
> 
> I think that a poll done in the past may have lead to different outcomes (for example in two recent changes to the "switch", one by you and one by Walter).

Great thoughts. One thing that maybe is not clear is that I afford to 
argue in these debates exactly because I don't get to decide. Walter 
never implements something that is not convinced of. It happens often 
that I suggest an improvement that he doesn't approve for one reason or 
another. Last time I suggested that switch should work with all types 
that support comparison (it's just weird that it only works with ints 
and strings), but he refused to consider it at least for the time being.

So, polls would be very useful to gauge what people want. That's very 
solid information.


Andrei