Re: It's That Time Again! The 2002 RPG Enhancement Poll

Hello Jon,

You wrote:
>If I were George and Co, there is one change I think I would experiment
>with.  That is to have everyone vote twice.  Once with their personal
>choices, and a second vote for those features that they think would be
>the most benefit to the RPG community at large.  The differences in
>weighting could be both informative and useful.  One reason for this is
>that I think currently people vote differently.

I think that would be a good idea.  I believe that most people currently
vote for what they perceive would immedaitely benefit them rather than
what would benefit the community.  Because I believe that, I vote for
what I want to ensure that those things get at least one vote but I do
have an eye to what will improve the language.

>Personally I always try to vote based on my view of the community
>benefit - not my own favorites.  Why?  Because I might tend to vote for
>(for example) full null support.  However, frankly I believe this would
>be a waste of development $s.  Only a fraction of the RPG community even
>use embedded SQL.  In that group only a tiny percentage know about, let
>alone use, null support.  The current support may not be perfect, but it
>is usable - and yet it is hardly used.  IMO upping the support level
>would have minimal impact to the usage level and therefore to the
>community as a whole.

Surely, given IBM's focus on SQL as the preferred database access method
and that the current support does make full use of SQL awkward, having
full support would make it easier to move to SQL.  (I'm not suggesting
that all applications should move just that, where it makes sense to use
SQL, having full-null support would make it easier and avoid the inane
questions about default field values -- such as the recent one regarding
zeroes in a date field.  Jeez! that's what the NULL value is for.)

>As indicated by some postings to this list, some have voted for this
>support - would they have voted that way for the community benefit?

The current survey allowed me to choose only two items:  Overloaded
procedures (#25) and dynamic basing pointer support (#17).  Although I
consider those choices to benefit the community I accept that many RPG
programmers would not understand why they are so important and not be
able to use them anyway.  Choosing just those two was really hard because
#17 seems only partly useful without TEMPLATE support (#30) and I also
badly wanted #32 in spite of the fact that I consider it a defect.

If I were allowed a second vote for 'community benefit' I would probably
forgo #17 and select from #4, #5, #14, #22, #27, or some of the $10
items, or maybe #3 because I would consider that most RPG programmers
would find them useful even though I consider many of them trivial.

Taking this opportunity to categorise the items in the list:

Items that should be done anyway because they correct design flaws:
        #5 #21 #26 #32

Items that should be done because they improve the language:
        #4 #6 #12 #13 #14 #17 #20 #23 #24 #25 #30 #31 #34 #41

Items that would make the common or garden programmer's life easier:
        #1 #2 #3 #8 #10 #11 #18 #19 #22 #28 #39

Items that would be nice to have:
        #7 #15 #27 #29 #33 #35 #36 #37

Items that shouldn't be done because they are brain-dead:
        #9

.... and waiting for the furore .....

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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