On Sun, May 03, 2020 at 11:14:33AM +0200, Philippe Vaucher wrote:
> > Now assume Alan is proofreading a patch coming from somewhere else.
> > Would you like him to read it as he reads his native language,
> > or as he reads a foreign language, dictionary in hand?
> 
> I agree with everything you said, I just wanted to point out this: of
> course I prefer Alan to use his native language. But at the same time
> languages do evolve... the french I speak nowadays is different than the
> one that was there when I was born, and VERY different than the one that
> was spoken 150 years ago. The thing is that it changed gradually, and I
> guess my proposal makes it look like it'd change too rapidly.

Definitely. A language that doesn't evolve is basically dead.

> So, basically we have to find a pace where most agree. From what I
> understand there are 3 point of views:
> 
> - Alan / Richard: 0 new aliases. Only new APIs.
> - Philippe: as many new aliases as needed where "obvious" (regexp, process,
> etc), probably around 50 (wild guess)
> - Most people's: Not against testing with just one topic (regexp), maximum
> 10 new aliases.... then wait a few years to see how it went before moving
> on to other topics.

I don't know if I could dare to quantify things. Watching what happens with
languages, "local dialects" just pop up in places and get used because there
are people who use them. OTOH, a language's job is to connect people, so
some process is needed to regulate all of that. In most regular languages,
it's just traveling and trading.

Your (native) language has the Académie [1], but some other languages don't
have that luxury :-)

> Do you feel that's accurate?

I think at the end it comes up to whether and  how people use it. If the
center of gravity of Emacs development moves, there's very little some
"cabal in power" (if there is any) can do. There are quite a few examples
(which were resolved in different ways) in that short history (Xorg,
gcc/egcs, Open vs LibreOffice, Own vs NextCloud...)

So the more experienced among us (I'm *not* among them!) are just some
kind of moderators.

Cheers

[1] Just a guess, based on your name.

-- tomás