Bartosz about Chapel

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday, November 10, 2011 18:23:35 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 11/10/2011 4:53 PM, bearophile wrote:
> > This is a (minor) wart of D. C# got this better, using the "sbyte" and
> > "ubyte" names. We have discussed this in past :-)
> 
> Sorry, but I think this is meaningless trivia.
> 
> There's been a lot of agonizing over names in D lately. They are a
> soul-sucking quagmire of wasting time.

Names can matter a great deal, but you can pretty much never get them 
completely right. There's always a problem of some sort with them. Sure, sbyte 
would make it clear that it's signed, but we don't have sshort, sint, or 
slong, and _those_ don't cause any confusion. Having sbyte would just make the 
language less consistent, which is _not_ a good thing. There's no point in 
debating it now unless we have a really good reason to change it (which we 
don't). Otherwise, it's just bikeshedding, and it wastes our time.

Bearophile has some good ideas, but he has too many of them for us to ever 
deal with them all even if they were all really good, and many of them are 
incredibly trivial. Obviously, he can suggest as many ideas as he likes, but I 
think that he'd stand a better chance of getting his ideas implemented if he 
presented far fewer of them. It would also take up less of everyone else's 
time. He's a valuable member of the community, but it would be better for 
everyone (him included) if his signal to noise ratio were much higher.

- Jonathan M Davis