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It sounds like a classic case of the Second System effect. Where the original product was functional but a maybe little too basic, so everybody has an idea of
by jandrese 2y ago
It sounds like a classic case of the Second System effect. Where the original product was functional but a maybe little too basic, so everybody has an idea of how to improve it. Many of the ideas are good on their own, but the committee ends up accepting far too many and the thing suffers from terminal feature creep.
- kazinator 2y agoFeature creep and Second System effect are all the rage now. Every recent language has them. If you don't constantly have three dozen Requests for Implementation brewing, seven of which are going into the next release, you're a dead project.
- dboreham 2y agoEmergent property of humans, it turns out.
- setopt 2y agoPerhaps we should make a language with a hard cap on the number of “features” in the language syntax + standard library. For everything you propose to add, you would then also need to propose something to remove.
- dotancohen 2y agoThough in principal I love the idea, it would kill backwards compatibility. But maybe each major version revision should have a vote on keeping or removing some older features.
- kazinator 2y agoOnly those holding no stakes would play the vote game; anyone actually depending on compatibility would silently (or sometimes not so silently) depart.
- JadeNB 2y ago> For everything you propose to add, you would then also need to propose something to remove. There are surely lots of features the proposer would be willing to remove (although one also has to define how to count the number of features, or else every proposal, no matter how long, will be for one giant feature, and will propose removing one tiny feature in return). The problem is that what I consider dispensable in return for my essential proposal will conflict with what the next programmer over considers essential ….