To me, the best way to get a language proposal to ...

# language-proposals

[cedric]

To me, the best way to get a language proposal to be looked at is to

1. Show a piece of mediocre code
2. Show how that code gets improved with the proposed feature.

Then the next step is to see if there's general agreement about the respective merits of both pieces of code and then to see if the code can be improved without adding a new feature to the language (e.g. library approach). Failing that, the language proposal has a good chance to be seriously looked at.

[poohbar]

I like that and I also think many of the current KEEPs are not following this. Even things that are easy to implement should go through the same scrutiny as things that are hard to implement.

[codeslubber]

By this definition, language design is solely concerned with the syntactic. To me the biggest problem in software is that most apps have either no model or an anemic leaky one, and not enough ways to prove it (the model). Maybe hardcore FP is a bridge too far with all its Category Theory loopiness but at least they are attempting to address those problems.

[benleggiero]

I think the top priority of language should be to make it easy for developers to write good code (fast, easy to read, easy to maintain). All language design decisions should branch from that

[cedric]

@benleggiero I don't think you'll find a single person disagreeing with this, the problem is how to concretely work toward that goal

[benleggiero]

@cedric I’m just concerned that many decisions are being made as compromises to an environment (e.g. “we can’t have that because of the JVM”) or to avoid a new major version / breaking change (e.g. “You should have had this idea this two years ago; the language is too mature now and we don’t want to break it / we want old code to compile in the new language version”)

[cedric]

@benleggiero The history of the language clearly shows the major decisions were based on clear design directions than environment based. Granted, now that the language is past 1.0, the margin to add new features is more limited but the language is still evolving. But that's separate from structural typing, which was actively discussed years back and pretty much unanimously rejected if I recall correctly

[benleggiero]

Forgive me; I wasn’t aware this message was about structural typing. I thought it was just a general message on the topic of language proposals and evolution.

[cedric]

My bad, I mixed the threads