On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Eli Barzilay <e...@barzilay.org> wrote: > Two hours ago, Neil Toronto wrote: >> On 10/01/2011 12:18 PM, Neil Van Dyke wrote: >> >> > Option #1 seems like an easy way to go, from what I can see. >> >> Okay, you've almost got me convinced again. I'm so >> wishy-washy. Sorry, Eli. > > Just to make my point here (since I avoided this thread): the > important question from my POV is of work that you will need to deal > with, vs benefit from that work. This poll thread, as I suspected, > shows that there are no important uses of `plot' from people who would > find it difficult to replace (require plot) to (require plot/compat). > (And that means that even Robby is not such a person.) > > Now, maintaining a compatibility collection named `plot' means that > there will be more work dealing with it, and as small as this might > seem, the expected benefits of that are so far zero. But it's still > your choice, as the person who needs to do all this work. As far as > the rest of us go, we're losing some potential improvements that you > could have implemented in that time.
Why is this work lessed by changing the name from plot to plot/compat? > And to go up a level -- all of that is not any point that can be > generalized to anything else. I consider these cases as each > requiring its own decision. It only happens that in this particular > case the benefits are so small, that any work seems wasted. > Especially given the history of the collection as undermaintained, > hard to use, and problematic to build. This is *completely* different > from Matthew changing something in the core language, where making > both the new and the old APIs work together -- the changes there can > be much more subtle (since they're almost always gradual, not a new > reimplementation), breaking stuff there is harder to follow (since > it's often not just changing a `require'), and even finding places > that would need to be adjusted is hard (which code will break if > `define-struct' gets the same semantics of `struct'?) compared to just > looking for (require plot). > > At this point, the amount of noise generated by this discussion is > definitely too much. The reason I suggested a *poll* was to have a > clean measure of the benefits/cost amounts, not to start a discussion > on the philosophical aspects of software changes and how to deal with > them. It's not the first time that such changes happened -- and > frankly, I'm surprised at how much noise this thing has lead to. > Compare that to the web-server change wrt responses -- this is a much > more established library which is used by much more real code, yet > adding a `compat' module went almost without a peep. For the record, I complained about that. (And then later was bitten by it :) Robby _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users
