General community and Process Questions (blog comment followups)

[Derek Foster]

>> coin contributions.  For example, back in May there was an open issue
>> concerning the grammar changes needed for underscores in numbers [5].
>> No one sent in a message on this matter until I sent in a grammar in
>> July [6].   Neither the coin list nor readers on my blog caught the
>> embarrassing but small mistake I made in the grammar [7].  In terms of
>> difficulty of language evolution, this grammar change is easy.  Having
>> taken an undergraduate class in compilers or automata theory is
>> sufficient background to work on this, but no one else contributed a
>> grammar for this despite presumed interest in the feature and the large
>> number of coin subscribers.
>
> May be this shown, that interest to number literals is relative small ?

I think that this more realistically indicates that everybody considers this someone else's problem to fix. (Presumably, mine, since I submitted the original proposal.) 

Unfortunately, I have been slammed lately by an upcoming product release at work as well as some issues in my personal life, and have had little time to do much else other than try to at least read the Project Coin list messages as they go by. I did put together an initial draft of a fix to the issues Joe raised, but I didn't have time to really run it through the wringer and analyze it for problems, so I didn't submit it to the list yet. When Joe submitted his fix, I was quite relieved that someone else had had the time to do a more complete job of it, and I was planning to go over it in detail, but I just haven't had time yet.

This is unfortunately a risk of having work done by volunteers -- since they aren't getting paid for the work they do, the work is subject to being delayed due to work that people ARE paid to do. As a result, realistically, extra time needs to be allocated for volunteer-driven efforts, and/or some kind of structure needs to be put in place so that if one person has trouble keeping up, that others can shoulder the load in some sort of controlled fashion. Right now, it is basically expected that whoever originally submitted a proposal is responsible for shepherding it through every distinct phase of its development, from proposal, to design, to implementation, answering criticisms about it, revising it, prototyping it, etc. etc. This is a LOT of work for one person. (It also requires that a single person be skilled in every step of the process, which requires a lot of different skills to be present in one person. A rare mix, which is unfortunately a significant limiting factor on proposals.) Of course, people who are interested in the proposal but not responsible for it are willing to offer criticisms, but not necessarily help (since raising issues takes MUCH less time than fixing them, after all). I think that this is a weakness of the process that Coin is using, and one that should be addressed in a future effort of this sort.

In any case, this is all I have time to write at the moment, since I am about to get in a car and take a much-needed vacation (which I am actually finally able to take, due to my having applied nose firmly to grindstone for the last month or so). I'll be back in a week, and I may be able to make a more substantial contribution at that time.

Thanks, Joe, for taking the time to address the deficiencies in the grammar. I appreciate it.

Derek