Suggestion: A wiki page for all answered "Why don't you ...?"

[Brian Goetz]

During the Java 8 days many of these found their way to Stack Overflow, 
and several of us (myself and Stuart especially) invested in creating 
good answers to these, to the point where eventually several folks in 
the community were able to start answering these rationale questions.  
There were a few folks who were pretty adept at ferreting out details 
from the lists and posting pointers.  This worked really well, and the 
effort of this dwindled over time.  But then AI ate (or threatened to 
eat) Stack Overflow, and it became a less effective filter for these 
questions.

I don't love being in the position of having to say "yes, we've talked 
about this plenty", since it's unreasonable to expect everyone to have 
read the entire history of all the various places where these things are 
discussed.  So I would be happy to see some folks index some of the past 
discussions, as it increases the value of answering these questions 
(because more people are likely to see it.)  But it's definitely work.

There's an OpenJDK wiki but which is mostly abandoned.  There is the 
amber-docs repo which gets published to `openjdk.org/projects/amber`, 
which is probably a better place to put it, and people can contribute 
via PRs.


On 12/12/2024 5:18 AM, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> I've been lurking in this list for quite some while. It's very 
> interesting too see all creative proposal, and always very refreshing 
> to read the well-formulated replies (often by Brian, but many others 
> contribute as well) on why this-or-that is not feasible.
>
> I think the list archive contains a treasure trove of information 
> about possible language features and ways Java development could have 
> gone, but did not -- and with good explanations of why that was not as 
> good idea as it looked in the first place.
>
> However, this treasure is hard to find. If you follow the list, you 
> see it pop up from time to time, but if you don't, there is no easy 
> way to get to this. This tend to lead to some popular ideas being 
> suggested over and over again (perhaps not as much here, as on other 
> channels, like Reddit).
>
> I think it would be great if these suggestion, together with the 
> reasoning provided for not implementing it, were collected on a web 
> site. The wiki seems to be a good place, but there are of course many 
> other possible solutions.
>
> I have contemplated doing this myself for quite some time, going 
> through the mail archive and extracting the relevant discussions, but 
> I always have more pressing things to do, and it is not likely I will 
> ever be able to do it. So I'm throwing this idea up in the air. I 
> realize many other are in the same situation as I am, but perhaps 
> there are some interested readers out there in the community that has 
> more time on their hands and that can help with such a task?
>
> /Magnus
>
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