[cpp-threads] C++ committee meeting in Mont Tremblant

[Herb Sutter]

I've been watching this thread, and just a quick comment on the tone:

> It is not our responsibility to adjust what we believe to meet the
political
> agenda of the standards committee. It should be our job to do what we
think is
> right in terms of current knowledge in the area, and what we believe
is best
> for C++ in the long run. We should be pro-active and push the
standards
> committee as far as possible, backing off only when we believe
sufficient good
> science has been accepted. We are the experts, and they should listen
to what
> we have to say. If they choose to ignore us, that's their loss.

Please forgive me for being uncharacteristically frank, but I think it's
important to say this forthrightly:

These and similar statements are quite out of touch, and demonstrate a
profound lack of understanding of the committee and its participants,
and of how to participate constructively as a part of a group.

The committee, like any group, have rightly ignored people who may have
had good ideas but who have only sniped from the sidelines and weren't
willing to put forth the time and effort to show up and participate like
everyone else.

The solution is simple: If it's worth it, then be willing to invest the
time to personally attend international meetings and propose solutions,
accept feedback and refine the proposals, and so on over a couple of
years or more (all with no guarantee that anything will be adopted even
after it has been refined in line with committee feedback, but that's a
fair bar because those same rules apply to everyone). If no one is
willing to personally invest the time it takes, usually over several
meetings == years, to propose and refine and repropose and do the work
to build consensus, which _everyone_ has to do, then the feature frankly
can't be that important.

> This issue is just one example of many high-level issues we should be
> discussing as part of this subcommittee. Concurrency needs a strong
memory
> model, but it needs a lot more, so why aren't we actively talking
about
> the "other" stuff, too?

FWIW, I agree with that point. But let me correct another
misunderstanding here: I saw the "subcommittee" wording mentioned in the
press a few months ago in an interview you gave, and it caused us a
brief flurry of emails to which we had to respond that the statement was
not accurate -- the original group on this list was never a subcommittee
appointed by ISO or ANSI (which seems to have been implied and is not
correct), they were a collection of interested experts offering input on
their own initiative whom we looked forward to hearing from -- and still
do. (If Lawrence is now on this list and running it, then it would be
correct to characterize it as an ad-hoc sub working group of the
Evolution working group of the ISO and ANSI committees.)

Again, please don't take this as discouragement -- we absolutely
encourage your participation. Many of you have participated in ISO/ANSI
C++ before and know better, but I wanted to correct some probably
innocent misimpressions for those who are newer to the process. You will
find that committee members are in general very sympathetic to your
concerns and are a fine bunch to work with both as experts and as
people, and confrontational feelings like some mentioned above (which I
understand are probably just due to some frustration with the speed of
the process so far) aren't necessary at all. Get to know us; you'll
probably like us even more than you now think! :-)

Herb