Final by default?

[Marco Leise]

Am Fri, 14 Mar 2014 13:48:40 +1000
schrieb Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com>:

> I feel like this was aimed at me, and I also feel it's unfair.
> 
> If you recall back to the first threads on the topic, I was the absolute
> minority, almost a lone voice. Practically nobody agreed, infact, there was
> quite aggressive objection across the board, until much discussion about it
> has passed.
> I was amazed to see in this thread how many have changed their minds from
> past discussions. Infact, my impression from this thread is that the change
> now has almost unanimous support, and by my recollection, many(/most?) of
> those people were initially against.
> 
> To say this is a small vocal faction is unfair (unless you mean me
> personally?). A whole bunch of people who were originally against, but were
> convinced by argument and evidence is not a 'faction' with an agenda to
> intimidate their will upon leadership.
> I suspect what seems strange to the participants in this thread, that
> despite what eventually appears to have concluded in almost unanimous
> agreement (especially surprising considering the starting point years
> back!), is the abrupt refusal.
> That's Walter's prerogative I guess... if he feels that strongly about it,
> then I'm not going to force the issue any more.
> 
> I am surprised though, considering the level of support for the change
> expressed in this thread, which came as a surprise to me; it's the highest
> it's ever been... much greater than in prior discussions on the topic.
> You always say forum participation is not a fair representation of the
> community, but when the forum representation is near unanimous, you have to
> begin to be able to make some assumptions about the wider communities
> opinion.

Me too, I got the impression, that once the library authoring
issue was on the table, suddenly everyone could relate to
final-by-default and the majority of the forum community found
it to be a reasonable change.

For once in a decade it seemed that one of the endless
discussions reached a consensus and a plan of action: issue a
warning, then deprecate. I was seriously relieved to see an
indication of a working decision making process initiated by
the forum community. After all digitalmars.D is for discussing
the language.

Then this process comes to a sudden halt, because Walter gets
negative feedback about some unrelated braking change and
Andrei considers final-by-default good, but too much of a
breaking change for what it's worth. Period. After such a long
community driven discussion about it.

One message that this sends out is that a proposal, even with
almost complete lack of opposition, an in-depth discussion,
long term benefits and being in line with the language's goals
can be turned down right when it is ready to be merged.

The other message is that the community as per this forum is
not representative of the target audience, so our decisions
may not be in the best interest of D. Surprisingly though,
most commercial adapters that ARE here except for one, have no
problem with this announced language change for the better.

I neither see a small vocal faction intimidating (wow!) the
leadership, nor do I see a dictate of the majority. At least
2 people mentioned different reasons for final-by-default that
convinced most of us that it positively changes D. ...without
threats like "we won't use D any more if you don't agree".

Paying customers including Facebook can have influence
on what is worked on, but D has become a community effort and
freezing the language for the sake of creating a stable target
for them while core language features are still to be
finalized (i.e. shared, allocation) is not convincing.

-- 
Marco