Re: [Asset Stewardship] About the Beman Project

From: Vinnie Falco (vinnie.falco_at_[hidden])
Date: 2024-09-15 20:26:32

On Sun, Sep 15, 2024 at 1:15 PM Andrzej Krzemienski via Boost
<boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Recently, there was a situation in a WG21 triannual meeting
> that the proposal for inplace_vector had to be withdrawn in the plenary
> voting at the last moment because it was observed that what had been
> approved by the subgroups was unimplementable. Having the library in the
> Beman Project would have prevented that from happening.

The larger problem here is the structure of wg21, which assumes that
all votes are equal. In other words, that everyone voting or everyone
participating in the review of a particular proposal have ideas and
talent of equal merit and skill. This is obviously not the case, and
the inappropriate application of "democracy" (especially where
meetings and votes are conducted in secret) here creates a predictable
result: a reversion to the mean. There has been an unfortunate push
towards driving increased attendance to WG21. If we assume a normal
distribution of talent, this means that the most votes cast in
committee will come from the average skilled. This might be OK if we
are talking about designing a third party library or putting together
a library collection, but it is definitely not OK if we are talking
about changing the standard.

The Beman Project may offer a temporary salve but it suffers from the
same structural weakness. The bar is set too low. It should be setting
off alarm bells that WG21 is so dysfunctional that requiring authors
to prove something is implementable is needed.

Thanks