On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 11:19 PM, wren romano
The real problem is the growing divide in the community between the "liberals" vs the "conservatives". We could define these groups as those who're willing to break things vs want more stability, or as those who embrace polymorphism vs those who want to minimize mental type inference, or a few other ways I'm sure. How exactly we define the groups doesn't much matter imo; the point is: there are two groups which are growing ever more divergent from one another. Changing how we make decisions isn't going to reconcile these two groups; so long as the groups are widely divergent, any decisions made will upset one or the other. So the real issue at hand is to address the following two questions:
(1) how can we reconcile the two groups, reducing the distance between them so as to reduce conflict? (2) supposing the groups cannot be (sufficiently) reconciled, how do we proceed?
It may help to have some data to better understand the community's postures. Perhaps we could design a survey with questions on each of these design orientations? I’m not sure at all that it’d be helpful to resolve conflicts, but it’d certainly be interesting to see what clusters of language design ideas come up — the division you mention certainly seems to be there in some intuitive sense, but our intuition might be flawed in many ways (is polymorphism “conservative” or “liberal”?). We could include questions relating to the number of public libraries published and maintained, time spent blogging, subscription to various mailing lists, and such, to see how design ideas relate to various forms of community involvement. Of course, results are likely to be awfully biased in many ways if such a survey is not designed, promoted and analyzed very carefully, and it may turn out that arguments based on the resulting data end up being harmful to the community’s discussions. I don’t know; I’m just curious!