Opportunity Cost and Proposal Selection

[Neal Gafter]

Joe-

What is your schedule for the selection process?

Regards,
Neal

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Joe Darcy <Joe.Darcy at sun.com> wrote:
> Hello.
>
> There has been some traffic on the list about criteria for proposal
> selection (and non-selection) and I wanted to discuss that briefly.
>
> First, a reminder from some earlier blog entries describing the context
> for Project Coin:
>
> "Especially with the maturity of the Java platform, the onus is on the
> proposer to convince that a language change should go in; the onus is
> not to prove the change should stay out."
> http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/criteria_for_desirable_small_language
> December 23, 2008
>
> "Given the rough timeline for JDK 7 and other on-going efforts to change
> the language, such as modules and annotations on types, only a limited
> number of small changes can be considered for JDK 7."
> http://blogs.sun.com/darcy/entry/guidance_measure_language_change_size
> December 11, 2008
>
> With nearly 70 proposals submitted to the mailing list and the Sun bug
> database having well over 100 open "requests for enhancements" (rfe's)
> for the language, the large majority of those proposals and rfe's will
> *not* be included in JDK 7 as part of Project Coin or any other effort.
>
> Project Coin will be limited to around 5 proposals total.  That's it.
>
> Therefore for Project Coin, in addition to determining whether a
> proposal to change the language is in and of itself appropriate, a
> determination also has to be made as to whether the change is more
> compelling than all but four or so other proposals.
>
> In economic terms, there an an opportunity cost in the proposal
> selection; that is, because of finite resources, choosing to have a
> particular proposal in the platform removes the opportunity to do other
> proposals.
>
> There will be good, compelling proposals that would improve the language
> *not* selected for Project Coin because there are a full set of better,
> more compelling proposals that are more useful to include instead.
>
> Having available prototypes for proposals, running the existing tests,
> and writing new tests can only better inform the forthcoming proposal
> evaluation and selection.
>
> -Joe
>
>