On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 1:32 PM Brandon Bennett <benn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have just read > https://github.com/golang/go/issues/33892#issuecomment-659618902 and since it > was posted on a closed issue I wanted to comment a bit more. > > I subscribed to this issue and read the updates for both the Go2 proposals as > well as the Go1 proposals and I enjoy reading them. I understand the > reasoning behind wanting to do less here but I do belive there are some > downsides as well. > > One reason I read these every week is that it gives people outside of the Go > team an insight into the thought process and the reasoning of decisions. > Also feedback on these changes hopefully should help to refine future > requests. I am really afraid that just "ignoring" requests continues or goes > back to the idea that that Go is not a community language and that the only > ideas and changes can come from Google employees (or past employees in the > case of bradfitz). The transparency here was awesome and I am very sad to > see it go away. > > I hope there is some other middle ground or at least some details around what > will go into hand picking? For the non-picked proposals will they just > remain open for some undetermined amount of time? Will they just be closed? > Is feedback on these still expected? Maybe the real solution is just to > meet up less? Maybe once a month or even once a quarter vs every week?
I think one way to describe what is happening is our growing awareness over time that most language change proposals don't bring enough value. The language is stable and is not looking to change in any significant way (except perhaps for adding generics). We've realized that we need to be upfront about that. What has been happening with language change proposals is that we say we don't see enough value, but naturally the proposer does see value, and often is not happy about our comments. Then we get into an uncomfortable discussion where we say no and the proposer says why not. This leads to hurt feelings and no useful progress, and we certainly don't feel good about it ourselves. For example, just to pick on one perhaps unfairly, see https://golang.org/issue/39530. I agree that feedback should ideally help to refine future requests, but after a couple of years of feedback I see no evidence that that is happening. Maybe our feedback is bad, but I also suspect that part of the problem is that most people who want to suggest a language change don't read the earlier feedback. Or perhaps the ones who do just don't go on to propose a change after all. I can certainly understand not reading all the feedback; there are 89 issues just on the topic of error handling alone, some of them quite long. But it follows that I can understand that the feedback isn't helping much. This doesn't mean that there will be some other process for making language changes. It's still the same process. There is no special route for Google employees (and most proposals by Google employees are rejected, just like most proposals by non-Google-employees). What it means, I hope, is that more changes will be rejected more quickly and with less back and forth discussion. One observation that led to this change is that often we would look at a proposal and immediately say "well, this one is not going to be accepted." But then it would take us 30 minutes to explain why, and then we would spend another few hours over the next few weeks replying to comments. But the fact was we knew in 30 seconds that it wasn't going to be accepted. It may sound blunt, but I think it will be a net benefit to the overall ecosystem to spend just 1 minute on that kind of proposal, not several hours over time. Hope this helps. Happy to hear comments. Ian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/CAOyqgcUrrDsHtmOJYr0vGaypFFAhhcfGdvDk9gh1SODeoZKYGg%40mail.gmail.com.
