[swift-evolution] Swift 5: start your engines

[Ted Kremenek]

> On Aug 8, 2017, at 3:06 PM, Erica Sadun <erica at ericasadun.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Aug 8, 2017, at 3:29 PM, Paul Cantrell via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> Perhaps I am too optimistic, and core team members correct me if I am speaking out of turn here, but…
>> 
>> I imagine that the core team will assist in providing implementations for proposals that are crucial to the progress of the language and/or highly popular — regardless of whether the proposal was authored by the core team or a community member.
>> 
>> From what I know of the team, they’re not going to let a good idea languish just because of the name that’s in the author field. I’m sure they _are_ going to strategically prioritize what gets attention, and that’s not a bad thing.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Paul
> 
> Perhaps I'm being overly optimistic but I see this change as enhancing collaboration between idea-level and code-level evolution. Requiring a preliminary implementation:
> 
> Ensures a proof of concept that the proposed change (like expanding `Self` to classes) is realistic and possible.
> Ensures that the Swift codebase impact can be measured at the time the proposal is evaluated.
> Encourages multi-author proposal teams, comprised of people who understand code impact as well those who can express the importance of the language expression from a user side. 
> Provides real world "road testing" of proposed toolchain enhancements, letting the changes be "tuned" before proposal. This minimizes adoption regrets, because the beta toolchain can be used with real code. (As with the tuples and closures)
> Upfront costs *will* be higher. Not only do you have to believe that a change is good, you must develop a working group that includes coders to create a prototype without any guarantee that the change will pass muster. 
> 
> Finding those coders and convincing them this will be a great change means that proposals will naturally skew towards Apple-driven rather than wider community-driven. However it does not exclude the latter, especially for passionate proposals that can find the coders to champion them.
> 
> -- Erica

I think this very nicely summarizes the intent here.  Having a proof of concept will increase the quality of proposals on many levels.  Myself and others in the Core Team also hope it will help strengthen the community in the ways Chris mentions — specifically encouraging folks to be get more involved on the implementation of the language and feeling a sense of ownership on driving a proposal from idea to implementation.  A natural consequence is that the proposals in the fullness of time will be balanced from different voices in the community, and less so from just the ones the current primary implementers have the capacity to implement.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/attachments/20170808/7450d46a/attachment.html>