[swift-evolution] [Accepted with Revision] SE-0099 Restructuring Condition Clauses

[Brent Royal-Gordon]

> I believe large syntax changes should have more discussion from more developers and not a very small subset of them. The review announcement needs to be broader: the swift blog needs to announce it so more people know.

No.

Firstly, for those who cannot follow the list—and I can't say I blame them—the -announce list already allows them to ignore everything except the beginnings of reviews. Anyone who wants to (and who speaks English) can be notified of any significant proposed change to the language and can submit their comments for the core team's consideration. That is enough.

The purpose of reviews is not to cast ballots for or against a feature. It is to submit arguments, for and against, for the core team to consider as they decide whether and how to address the problem the proposal's "Motivation" section describes. For that purpose, there is no need to collect hundreds or thousands of reviews, and if we did, the review manager would be swamped anyway. It is enough to get a reasonable variety of eyes, from a reasonable variety of perspectives, on the problem.

I think that has happened here. We have not heard from every perspective, but we have heard from enough of them that adding more will not help all that much. Feedback always has diminishing returns: going from one person to two is far more valuable than going from fifty-one to fifty-two.

And in particular, I *don't* think the beginner perspective is an especially worrisome one for this particular proposal. Though some of the syntaxes we considered might have been confusing for beginners (*cough*semicolon*cough*), the one the core team settled in is actually one of the simplest, and certainly much simpler than the status quo. If anything, the people most disadvantaged by this solution are the power users who are used to the "multiple if-let" shorthand and will now have to add extra keywords to their code.

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Brent Royal-Gordon
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