(j3.2006) Materials for 199

[Malcolm Cohen]

Hi Van,

>The goal of the proposal is to get the "generic programming" work item
>from the 2008 work plan back onto the agenda.

Yes, I realised that.

Despite my negative comments so far, I am certainly willing to at least look at 
it at 199 and discuss it.  I would be very surprised if it were suitable for 
F2015, but I've been surprised before.

In my view we also need to consider the longer view, otherwise there is the 
danger of it ending up as a dead end (a "new wart").  I feel that this is more 
likely to be done better as a TS first rather than attempting to do it in 
F2015... anyway, we can discuss at 199.

>  Hopefully, we won't allow
>the perfect to be the mortal enemy of the good enough this time around.

That is not what happened.  In my opinion, the resources necessary to proceed 
further with generic programming in F2008 were taken by coarrays and some of the 
supposedly "simple" stuff like contiguous.  Although we pretended in the early 
stages, we did not have the resources even to do a good job of both generic 
programming and coarrays, much less a perfect job.  Certainly I did not have 
time left over to spend on doing more generic programming...

Given that the committee were committed to coarrays, spending the resources on 
improving the quality of the coarray description and technical details was, in 
my opinion, the right decision.

>The more the
>proposals are discussed by e-mail, the less time will be wasted on
>nonstarters at Delft.

Except that many people don't have the time or energy to do that level of work 
via email in between meetings.  You might have noticed that I have been dropping 
out of conversations quite simply because I have too many other things to do 
(the "day job"); many people have even less time/energy available to them.

Yes, floating proposals via email is good but detailed discussion will have to 
wait until the meeting.

>Apparently, we might as well discuss the work plan at 199, since there
>are still no papers in the repository.

Right, I am going to have to bow out of detailed email discussions for the next 
couple of weeks at least because I don't have time to do that and also
(a) achieve the current deadline I am working towards,
(b) write up the J3 papers on my list to write up!

Cheers,
-- 
................................Malcolm Cohen, Nihon NAG, Tokyo.