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

[Ethan McCue]

One practical trouble in assembling this is that the mailing lists aren't
exactly indexed/searchable.

Another orthogonal concern is that we are currently at a point in history
where most people involved in important choices over time are still alive.
Starting to do historian work is important for reasons other than dealing
with "why don't you"s.

I'll make it my project to put something together by new years though.

On Fri, Dec 13, 2024, 6:26 AM Louis Wasserman <lowasser at google.com> wrote:

> Just seeing that it hasn't been mentioned, Guava's Idea Graveyard is an
> example of this specific flavor of thing:
> https://github.com/google/guava/wiki/IdeaGraveyard.  (It's pretty old,
> though, which reflects some of the downsides.)
>
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 10:34 AM Archie Cobbs <archie.cobbs at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Dec 12, 2024 at 10:07 AM Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There is the amber-docs repo which gets published to `
>>> openjdk.org/projects/amber` <http://openjdk.org/projects/amber>, which
>>> is probably a better place to put it, and people can contribute via PRs.
>>>
>>
>> I think putting something online under amber-docs is a great idea -
>> especially the part where people can contribute using PR's, which fosters
>> decentralized collaboration on the maintenance of the list.
>>
>> While it would be ideal to have a complete directory of ideas with
>> accompanying summaries of all that has been discussed, we should probably
>> start with something simpler and more maintainable.
>>
>> Here's a proposal: Have a list of "previously discussed ideas". Each idea
>> has a one line description, a one paragraph summary, an optional example,
>> and a bullet-point list of one or more links to the thread(s) in the
>> archive that contain all the gory details of the discussion.
>>
>> Here's a simple example...
>>
>> *Idea:* Using switch statements for if/else control flow
>>
>> *Description:* Support "switches on nothing" where the cases simply
>> provide the conditions on which to execute various code branches.
>>
>> *Example:*
>>
>>     public double toInches(String value) {
>>         switch {
>>         case when value.endsWith("mm") -> return 0.0393701 *
>> Integer.parseInt(value.substring(0, value.length() - 2));
>>         case when value.endsWith("ft") -> return 12 *
>> Integer.parseInt(value.substring(0, value.length() - 2));
>>         case when value.endsWith("light-years") -> return 3.725e+17 *
>> Integer.parseInt(value.substring(0, value.length() - 2));
>>         default -> throw new IllegalArgumentException("can't parse
>> value");
>>         }
>>     }
>>
>> *Discussion:*
>>
>>    -
>>    https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/amber-dev/2024-October/008939.html
>>
>>
>> Just now seeing Eirik's reference to Project Jigsaw's Issue Summary
>> document. I like this even better but someone would have to step up and
>> take ownership.
>>
>> -Archie
>>
>> --
>> Archie L. Cobbs
>>
>
>
> --
> Louis Wasserman (he/they)
>
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