GCC 4.6

[jasonw]

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

> On 3/28/11 5:47 PM, bearophile wrote:
> > Andrei:
> >
> >> To be brutally honest, I'd say that this discussion (and a few
> >> others) could be reduced to zero.
> >
> > I have suggested the Google Summer of Code for D even the past year,
> > and I agree it's important for D future. But I think Walter has to
> > know something about modern JITs&  dynamic languages too. I have had
> > bad experiences with Guido (Python author) that until no more than
> > one or two years ago seemed to didn't even know what a trampoline
> > stub is, and this has caused some problems. You have to take care of
> > the knowledge of your Benevolent Dictator For Life, I want Walter to
> > know lot of things.
> >
> > Bye, bearophile
> 
> Teaching van Rossum or Bright is a bit assuming. I suggest a simpler 
> path - apply the noble goal of knowing a lot of things to yourself, and 
> use that expertise to contribute to the community.

I've managed to keep my mouth shut about non-technical issues until earlier today. But since I already started, I'd like to stay as constructive as possible and suggest finding some kind of unified guidelines for technical discussion.

The reason for this is, I find bearophile's tone a bit annoying more often than I'd want. This isn't a personal attack, I just wish that there was a better way for him to interact with the community. Bearophile's actions have already been criticized several times in the past, but he doesn't seem to respond in any way. <tasteless>I can't keep wondering if he has Asperger syndrome</tasteless>. I just want to bring up some remarks about improving the quality of posts and raising the S/N ratio. Thanks.

Basically what bearophile discusses is: 
 - feature proposals (sometimes useful, more often not)
 - bug reports and fixes
 - optimization tips
 - benchmark results
 - user experience reports
 - links to research papers
 - links to discussion boards (most often reddit)
 - "education"
 - uninformed and totally uncalled-for remarks about personal motives and other personal things

How we could improve the process is that
1) We stop making "guesses" about the motivations and timetables of community members.
2) I also hate these "time ago i suggested this feature, and bla bla bla, see bugzilla # XXX". Bugs are being constantly fixed and this kind of advertisement of your bug reports doesn't help in any way. If you're such a rocket scientist, write some patches instead.
3) We should spent some time learning english and communicating the main idea with less words. Seriously, if you've been hitting the "post this!!" button for years, you should consider improving your grammar every now and then. Reading posts, spanning multiple pages, written in incomprehensible "semi-engrish" is really boring. I mostly react with "tl;dr".
4) Stop posting so many feature requests. They are often contradictory and just annoy the key persons.

And finally a reply to the bearophile's:
> >  You have to take care of
> > the knowledge of your Benevolent Dictator For Life, I want Walter to
> > know lot of things.

Listen kid, you're some biology student, right? You're just coding for fun. And more importantly, you haven't participated in any long term real world systems programming projects. This kind of work experience doesn't give you the competence to evaluate the knowledge and work of people with tens of years of programming experience under their belt.

You might be terribly smart, but you're missing the point. Can you see what we are building here? A whole language ecosystem. Andrei has done great work by attracting competent CS persons in to the community. The development is changing. We need to find important persons, organizations, solve project management issues and all kinds of non-technical stuff now. Some kid posting yet another daily feature proposal isn't helping us at all. It's distracting and just plain noise. Can you see this from our POV? I really hope this forum is getting moderation once the community grows large enough.