Generality creep

[Olivier FAURE]

On Friday, 29 March 2019 at 16:26:06 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Years ago, I had the hots for a girl so I did what many silly 
> guys do - I friended her. She confessed she had aspirations for 
> writing. Being likely inclined as well and wanting to please, I 
> enthusiastically proffered interest in her endeavor. So she 
> gave me a manuscript to read.

I don't think this comparison is appropriate, and honestly, I 
think it's a little disrespectful to contributors.

Like, contributors aren't trying to get a date. They don't want 
to be teased, they don't want to play social games, they don't 
want things to be dramatic or fun or romantic. They want to 
submit a change, and they want it to be straightforward.

Also, they're mostly volunteers, helping on their free time out 
of passion. Comparing them to a girl hamstringing you for writing 
advice seems extremely condescending.

> It was... bad. Not just bad, fractally bad - from the overall 
> arc down to grammar and punctuation. Wanting to say something 
> nice about it, I went for advice to my uncle, a published 
> author (his obituary is online - Nicuta Tanase). He said, kid, 
> just mention a couple of things that are objective and would 
> improve things.
>
> And so I did, not realizing I was creating a larger problem for 
> myself. Because a week later, she came with another draft in 
> hand, saying: "I fixed it! Now it's good for publishing... 
> right?"

That doesn't mean early reviews aren't valuable.

Like, I get that some people get sore when you tell them that a 
submission they've spent a lot of effort on just isn't good 
enough, and sometimes they will be unreasonable no matter what 
you say.

(and, as I've said before, the community has a tendency to jump 
to "Oh, W&A are being stubborn and ignoring The Will of The 
People again" every time you make a design decision someone 
doesn't like)

But the response to that is *more* communication, not less. If 
someone's PR is too bad to be merged, you're not going to help 
anyone by letting the person work on code that has no chance to 
be accepted. Same thing for DIPs.

Saying "This would be much easier if the community was bigger and 
people fought for my attention" is just wishful thinking. You 
don't solve a communication problem by becoming a cult icon, you 
solve it by communicating better, and earlier.

> Look at what happens in Rust. People get over each other to add 
> quality to the language, because if they don't, the next guy 
> has a better proposal, idea, or code. There's a crowd at the 
> door, putting pressure on the folks within. Folks don't go 
> around telling Niko Matsakis he's a chowderhead who could learn 
> a thing or two.

Seriously, I'm worried that the takeway you're getting from all 
this is "the community is unreasonable, unlike Rust's community 
which has a healthy respect for the maintainers". It's not just 
that. The D community is has a ton of people whose experience 
writing a PR is "I spent two weeks writing that code, got a 
comment from Walter six months later that asked to clarify what X 
did, I added some documentation, and I haven't had any news for a 
year".

If you look at the open PRs on rust, all PRs in page 3 are less 
than two weeks old. By comparison, some PRs in page 3 of dmd are 
from May 2018, almost a year ago!

I realize that the D team has way less resources than Mozilla to 
dedicate to following PRs, but acting like the only problem is 
that PR authors are capricious is just disingenuous.