A program? and Project 'Government'

[Ursula Dreier]

Matthew Tuck schrieb:

> OK, well the C++ meets the criteria of being freely available to
> everyone, object-oriented and known.  For a prototype these are the main
> criteria I think we should follow.  I believe our compiler should be
> able to be fairly OS-independent at first so cross platform issues
> should be restricted to integer sizes and such.

I have MSVC++ 5.0, but if need be I'll switch to GNU C++.I'm not sure
whether STL is the same in GNU C++ and MSVC++, but there shouldn't be a
problem to replace MS with GNU as long as we don't use MS specific stuff
(hope that won't happen for a long time).

> There can sometimes be problems with design by committee where you end
> up supporting everyone's features.  I don't see a problem with this in
> libraries given adequate feature integration and orthogonality, but it's
> a real problem in the language proper.  Part of the appeal of the
> dictator is "the final word".  I do remember being told by someone that
> has taught me a lot "democracy doesn't work in software".  To a large
> degree, unfortunately, I think it's true.

If we want to go that way, selecting this person won't be easy. It should be
someone with great experience yet open minded and he/she should have a lot
of time to spare. As long as the project has as few active members, I think
we should give democracy a try. I would like the idea to prove that
democracy works even in a field that is as burdened with matters of taste as
software design (strange thing, given the very nature of the trade being all
about logic...). There should be room for "minorities" as long as the
overall approach won't be spoiled too much by this. Hey, it should be *fun*
after all - always keep that in mind. If we see that it doesn't work well,
there will still be enough time to change our minds.

> And voting with code is a powerful idea too.

Exactly!