Send me your list of D gripes and wishes

[John Colvin]

On Sunday, 1 January 2023 at 08:53:58 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> On Saturday, 31 December 2022 at 18:25:38 UTC, Walter Bright 
> wrote:
>> True enough. I adjust the style based on what the particular 
>> sequence of code is doing. I doubt "good style" can be 
>> mandated. Note that D's style checker has a number of knobs 
>> that turn various checks off, and this is used in its checking 
>> of the compiler source files.
>
> Clearly we are in sympathy here :-)  But I've had to recognize 
> that not everyone agrees, and that people have well-motivated 
> reasons for wanting to try to automate the code style.  
> Typically, they want to be able to put 100% focus on what the 
> program is _doing_ and not have to discuss, debate, or spend 
> time manually tweaking stylistic aspects.

This is key. Velocity is increased by decoupling arguments about 
formatting (go complain to the autoformat authors) from progress 
on functionality.

The web of dependencies in the software development process (hard 
like "can't merge B until we merge A" and soft like "I really 
want to focus on A and not get distracted by B") is complicated 
and large and mostly hidden. Anything that slows down anything 
will slow down something else which slows down everything.

Slightly uglier code, but no PR ever waits a day on formatting 
complaints, no reviewer energy ever goes in to explaining 
formatting? It's a no-brainer.