Syntax poll

[Mikael Grev]

Brian,

If you wanted to know how a car should handle in traffic, would you poll the doctors in theoretical physics that are the experts on the differential equations in the suspension, or would you ask the target audience drivers?

One should always ask in the middle of the bell curve, if they understand the question. When it comes to the extreme technical details of this proposal I think they don't, but when it comes to syntax I think they do.

There are one reason not to ask them and that's if you are afraid they'll make the "wrong" choice. But then you shouldn't ask anyone and instead make the decision on what you believe is the right choice and motivate that.

Cheers,
Mikael

On Jun 11, 2011, at 17:38 PM, Brian Goetz wrote:

>> Yes, I was chastised for daring to mention it publicly at
>> http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/06/lambda-syntax and according to
>> comments there, it appears that the 100 vote limit has already been
>> exceeded.
> 
> For everyone's benefit: what I was trying to do here was poll the 
> lambda-dev community, not the entire Java developer community.  I wanted 
> to get the sense from a small group that had already been thinking about 
> the issue for a while, and had seen most of the alternatives at least 
> once before, not a mass poll of people who were seeing the alternatives 
> for the first time and only thought about it for a few seconds. 
> (Because the data is now mixed together, I have the worst of both worlds.)
> 
> The survey was further polluted because not only did the link escape 
> (I'll accept that's my fault for not explicitly asking not to, lesson 
> learned), but because Alex' blog entry restated the questions in his own 
> words!  So not everyone was even voting on the same thing.  I suspect 
> most people here read my guidelines and thought about it a bit before 
> they voted.  Most of the people who discovered the poll via twitter 
> didn't even see those guidelines.
> 
>> So we might as well talk about this now.
> 
> You can, but I am still asking that you not.
> 
> But here's something we can talk about: is it even practical to take a 
> poll of this group?  I am more than willing to repost the poll, but I 
> want data on what *this* group thinks, and that won't happen if the poll 
> is reposted elsewhere with someone else's paraphrasing of what the 
> instructions were.  (I can post polls on twitter too, and I might do 
> that some day, but that's not what I want now.)