The DIP Process

[Jonathan Marler]

On Tuesday, 26 February 2019 at 11:28:56 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Again, we're all open to suggestions on how to improve the 
> process, so feel free to leave feedback here or email me 
> directly.
>
> Thanks!

I think most points of the DIP process make sense, but it has one 
very large problem.  Feedback from language maintainers (Walter 
and Andrei) is not done until the end of the process. You're 
asking someone to go through a process that can take a year 
before the people who have the power to accept or reject the 
proposal look at it or leave any feedback.  This is extremely 
wasteful of the author's time, the reviewer's time and causes 
extreme pressure for everyone involved.  A years worth of 
waiting, debate and revision that are now wasted and could have 
easily been avoided if language maintainers left their feedback 
early on.  Walter and Andrei should be involved in the process 
throughout, not just render judgement at the end.

In the years I've been here I have found that feedback from 
anyone other than Walter and Andrei has very little bearing on 
what Walter and Andrei will think.  The entire community can 
think an idea is great, but then Walter or Andrei completely 
reject it.  And the opposite is true as well, I've seen W&A 
champion an idea that the community generally rejects. Designing 
a process to ask many people to create and perfect a proposal for 
a year catered to 2 specific people without any feedback from 
them is mind-boggling to me.

Based on my observations, my guess is that the DIP process was 
designed to alleviate the amount of work needed from Walter and 
Andrei, but look what it's produced.

To Walter and Andrei:

The amount of decision-making power you hold needs to be matched 
by the amount of involvement you have in the process.  There's no 
such thing as a free lunch, you can't just punt the work to 
everyone else for so long and then expect everything to work out 
great when all that work is completely rejected.  This is a gross 
misuse of people's time and a good way to foster a hostile 
community. When you leave early feedback, you're likely to trade 
a years worth of debate and revision between many people for a 
few minutes of your time.

Since you asked for suggestions, here's how I would revise the 
process:

Step 1: Research your proposal, search through the forums/DIP 
repo/github/Google
Step 2: Create a forum post with your proposal,  Walter or Andrei 
is required to either accept or reject whether the proposal 
warrants the effort to formalize it.
Step 3: If formalization is accepted, the author does so

We are now at Step 1 of the current DIP process.  I would then 
follow the current process as it exists with the modification 
that Walter and Andrei be involved throughout.  DIPs should be a 
document that contains the research and results of a proposal 
that includes feedback from the entire community, including 
Walter and Andrei. Seeing it as a document created by the 
community to be presented to Walter and Andrei with no feedback 
from them results in the problems I discussed above.