Comments on: Bob vs. Gavin, no holds barred

By: Rob Jellinghaus

Rob Jellinghaus — Mon, 11 May 2009 01:49:52 +0000

OK, glad I evidently didn’t mis-characterize anything too badly from Neal’s perspective There’s just as much political sausage made at Microsoft as anywhere else, no doubt. But the benevolent dictator model is fairly firmly entrenched — Anders Heljsberg (wow, I knew how to spell that!) is the final arbiter over what goes in C#, period, end of story. Likewise, AFAIK, Don Syme and F#. Agreed completely that benevolent dictatorship is much better than community veto power where language design is concerned.It looks like the comment of Bob’s that I quoted got retro-deleted by Gavin, which is why it doesn’t appear in the RSS feed anymore, even. Oh, well, I’m going to leave it up here. Sorry, Gavin! (Do I smell a bridge burning? We’ll see whether the flames arrive in my email or not….)

By: gever.tulley

gever.tulley — Sat, 09 May 2009 21:09:07 +0000

Well, it seems to me that you are mixing political levels here. I propose that, subjectively, the “back-room politics” you refer to are roughly analogous to the internal politics at Microsoft. Which means that the JSR process still has the benefit of supporting an open and visible dialog up to that point – the fact that back-room politics can derail an openly made decision is a flaw that still/just needs to be fixed. Microsoft has the potential to deliver great work because they could side-step the back-room politics and replace it with the gifted benevolent dictator (what Steve Jobs is to Apple) who could prevent the political process from compromising the design.As the years go by, I find myself using more of the work product of small teams lead by visionaries than I do the standardized API’s built by committees.

By: Neal Gafter

Neal Gafter — Fri, 08 May 2009 23:20:26 +0000