Re: stepping down as project manager

[David Kastrup]

Janek Warchoł <address@hidden> writes:

> On Sat, Oct 13, 2012 at 3:50 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> Funny that you mention that.  I was talking about the situation
>>> with my oldest friend (now a professional programmer for the past
>>> 11 years).  He couldn't believe that I was spending so much energy
>>> arguing with people who argued against project requirements on the
>>> basis of the current implementation.
>>
>> There is a fine line between arguing on the basis of the current
>> implementation, or arguing on the basis of the current _design_.
>> Replacing arbitrary choices by other arbitrary choices is not progress.
>
> I think that Graham raised a very important subject here: it's
> important that we (developers as a whole) not only know what is being
> changed in Lily, but also *why* it's changing in this way and not
> another.

That's supposedly what we are having discussions about and using the
tracker for.

> In this case, my understanding is that David was arguing against some
> recent proposals because they would make it hard or impossible to
> achieve corehence of design.  Unfortunately, from what i see Graham
> understood that David is arguing on the base of implementation (i.e.
> "no, because we already wrote it the other way").  This seems to me to
> be a serious misunderstanding.

Well, those discussions are usually going along the lines "let's replace
x with y and/or do x in this manner" -- "that would not be how we do it
elsewhere, how is that supposed to fit with everything else?" -- "I was
not talking about everything else.  You are changing the subject".

It is not like it is _forbidden_ to think about changing everything else
(I am doing some of that stuff right now with the symbolism patch), but
there is nothing gained by _ignoring_ the problem.

Now naturally I am not all too much interested in designing detailed
approached for working around the shortcomings of proposals I consider
going in the wrong direction in the first place.  But since nobody else
does it either, I am a single point of failure.

> Unfortunately, David seems to be the only active developer that
> understands some parser subtleties - in other words, only he fully
> knows the whys.

Well, there is nothing magic about that as nobody else ever looks at the
parser.  It is like saying that somebody is the sole musician
understanding the subtleties of playing a flute, simply because he is
the only one who has ever bothered touching one.

-- 
David Kastrup