Hi! > I started for the same reason: to help the community pull together and > argue less, by having a codified set of values.
The risk here however is for the document to be seen as a means to "argue less" by way of excluding certain points of view from discussion. That would not be a good thing. This is the main concern for codifying such things - as soon as you have written The Rules, next thing that happens is rule lawyering and instead of considering arguments on their merits, people start arguing whether raising this or that proposal violated the Rules and whether their opponents should be silent because The Rules say so. This is tempting because arguing rules is usually easier than arguing merits (The Rules are always the same and the merits are always new), but winning on the rules is never satisfactory and rarely healthy, because the other side always feels they have not been properly heard. > "Consider a proposal to remove a function from PHP. If PHP had a manifesto, > heated discussions could be minimised: > * Does the manifesto say that maintaining backwards compatibility is more > important than cleaning up the standard library? Removing it is not inline > with PHP’s vision. > * Does the manifesto say that rarely-used functions should be removed to > make the codebase lean? Removing it is inline with PHP’s vision." But do we really want to pre-commit one being always more important than the other in any case, no matter what? Do we want to pre-commit never considering specific case on its merits and always be satisfied with "The Rules say A more important than B, therefore function has to be removed and you can't argue it's important because The Rules are supreme, kneel before The Rules!" I certainly wouldn't feel satisfied with such outcome. We can reflect certain philosophy and premises we consider preferred, but we shouldn't pre-commit to it excluding discussion. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
