My two cents

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 10/21/17 9:47 AM, Martin Nowak wrote:
> On Friday, 20 October 2017 at 18:11:50 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>> On Friday, 20 October 2017 at 16:36:28 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
>>> It might help to have some sense of how the main devs time on D is 
>>> being used.
>>
>> Definitely, I currently have no clue what they are on.
> 
> Tried that, didn't resonate that much, and is also quite some work.
> So we mostly stick to internal discussions atm.
> https://forum.dlang.org/post/o2g7mg$12oa$1@digitalmars.com
> 
> Timelines and planning also don't work too well with volunteering.

Martin's levelheaded answers are much appreciated. (For what it's worth 
I've been traveling a fair amount recently which brings money in 
Foundation's coffers and more attention to the D language. I am coping 
with the unpleasant reality I haven't written real code in months.)

The matter discussed in this thread seems to have been suddenly rendered 
political, which is why I find it opportune to intervene - in all 
likelihood, improving nothing :o).

Sticking to technical points, some of the original points are easy to 
explain as misunderstandings (e.g. safe/system/trusted - yes all three 
are needed), whereas others can be converted productively into real 
steps forward for the language.

Using the topic of the Elvis operator as a running example, a good DIP 
would contain motivation such as:

* Present evidence of the successful use of ?: in other languages

* Present evidence of workarounds being used in D such as orElse, 
lazyElse etc.

* Present evidence of the usefulness of the ?: operator in gcc, see 
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-7.2.0/gcc/Conditionals.html

* Show how production code fragments in dmd, phobos, or other codebases 
would be significantly improved by the use of the operator

Yes, there's no guarantee that such a DIP would be approved. But the 
"need a relationship with the cabal to get things in" angle is very 
damaging to our community. So is the framing of the language 
enhancements topic as a fight against arbitrary prejudice. These kind of 
allegation discourage people from putting good work in, which is all 
that's needed.


Andrei