Generality creep

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/29/19 9:10 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> It's clear that Walter & Andrei excel at technical expertise, but
> lack in the people skills department.

As Walter tells me on the phone when it comes about community, "the main 
problem with our community is it's poorly led" - a very humble, 
humbling, and positive take.

Speaking for myself, my doing a poor job at leadership in our community 
is so obvious to me, it has almost become a cop-out. It's second to none 
in terms of failure per unit of time invested, so in a way simply 
admitting I'm just not good at it is the easy way to explain an 
overwhelmingly complex reality.

This had me revisit the past for similarities and differences. And that 
inevitably takes to C++.

In the C++ community the outcome has been quite the opposite. After 
Modern C++ Design (of which a friend went so far as to say "showed 
Bjarne what C++ really was about"), I have inadvertently enjoyed 
enormous impact and inspirational power, whilst being aloof to it. One 
forum post was enough to determine Hans Boehm and Herb Sutter to lead 
the standardization of threads in C++11; off-the-cuff ideas and 
conversations became N4259 or P0323R1; Mojo, an afternoon's worth of 
work, may have provided at least part of the reason for rvalue 
references. To this day, I am receiving credit about things I'd all but 
forgotten about. I could burp in a keynote and someone will create a 
great C++ template out of it. I knew things came full-circle when I got 
this question following my "The Next Big Thing" talk: "Have you heard of 
std::conditional?" (meant as a clever comeback to my plea for "static 
if"). I realized that both the person asking and myself had forgotten 
I'd invented the blessed thing.

And this is most puzzling, because I haven't given C++ the time of the 
day in a long while, so in terms of 
at-least-somewhat-related-to-leadership-impact per unit of effort, my 
participation C++ has been quite productive. (And for a good part it's 
been unwitting and almost unwilling, a la Stepan Trofimovich 
Verkhovensky in Dostoyevsky's "Demons" - hopefully in a positive way 
though.)

Not to say that arguably the very best of my work is to be found in D, 
many miles away from what I could ever do for C++. But even not counting 
that: with me being a common part of the inequation, I can be simplified 
away. Which leads to the most puzzling question: why have the outcomes 
across the C++ and D communities have been so different?

The answer to this question may unlock the potential of our community.