milancurcic
commented
4 years ago Thanks Ondrej, I support this proposal. At this time I don't have anything to add to it, but I'd like to express a few observations and open-ended questions.
- As a Fortran application developer of 13 years, I found the committee quite removed and opaque, something between a benevolent mythical creature and an urban legend. Over the past few years, I've learned a lot from you, Steve, and few other members about how it works. Only recently I discovered that anybody can join the J3 mailing list, and I did. My point being, even though the J3 mailing list was publicly open, it wasn't obvious to me. It's possible that so many other people that would otherwise want to participate or just read aren't aware of it.
- Now that I understand better how it works, it makes sense why it's opaque and why the progress is so slow:
- It's quite difficult to join -- be an alternate to an existing member, or pay membership to join as self.
- It's also difficult to remain a member -- don't miss more than one meeting in a row. For many of us with busy schedules and/or lack of budget, it just doesn't work even if the good will is there.
- Discussions via mailing lists and voting in meetings. This worked well a few decades ago, there are much better development models nowadays. This repo is a great example of one aspect of such development.
- I understand that the ultimate bottleneck is the number of compiler developers to implement features, however if the committee worked more openly and closer to the community, the community could grow and more compiler developers could join or come about by learning how to do it.
- Like @FortranFan likes to ask "for whom Fortran?", I think we should also ask "for whom the Fortran Standards Committee?". At a time when various flavors of FORTRAN were rampant in the wild, standardization made sense. I also understand that large enterprises put a lot of trust to something with an ISO stamp on it. However, does this model best serve the community, and even large enterprises nowadays? Should we look at some examples of productive language development teams like Python, Go, or Rust? Yes, they're backed by large corporations, but so is Fortran (Intel, Cray, IBM, NVIDIA etc.).
Anyhow, I ramble and don't mean to hi-jack the topic further. I didn't say anything that wasn't said before, but I think they're conversations we need to have. I'm beyond grateful for the committee's and compiler developers' hard work and the way Modern Fortran has evolved. Both my research and business are in large part thanks to it, and I'm sure I'll be a happy Fortranner for years to come. However, let's keep bringing up the conversation and reassessing the best way going forward.
If I'd pull out anything specific to this proposal, my recommendation for the committee would be to make it easier for people to participate, specifically:
- Lower the requirements for becoming a member and remove the requirement for physical attendance of meetings.
- Adopt a publicly open and online venue for language development. This repo is an essential step toward such venue.
jacobwilliams
certik
sblionel
Problem
The J3 committee currently does not seem to have written down rules how it operates, how a proposal can be submitted (and what requirements it needs to satisfy), how and when it will be considered, and the committee currently does not provide official feedback why a proposal got rejected. Goals:
Not waste precious committee time and not delay 202X standardization
Respond to every proposal (currently the committee sometimes ignores a proposal)
Get a wider community discussion around every proposal (currently the committee sometimes advances a proposal without proper discussion with the wider community or even the committee itself)
Proposal
I am attaching a proposal to improve how the J3 committee operates in order to make it a lot more efficient and achieve the above goals. At the same time the proposal is not radical and only requires a few small changes to how the committee operates and thus might have a good chance of actually being adopted.
committee_workflow.txt
I already discussed this proposal with about 7 people on the committee, and the feedback I am getting is either supportive, or a request for a wide discussion about this to see if we can arrive at a consensus.