Re: how to make decisions?

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling]

On 03/09/12 14:18, David Kastrup wrote:
> I don't have a good answer here, and I am not particularly happy with
> suggesting that the work I end up doing will not likely be shaped much
> by committee or community decisions but rather mostly by my own
> conscience and programmer instincts.  Which, in turn, are shaped by the
> perceived needs of the community.

Would it be better in this respect if, instead of proposing syntax changes 
(which are easily problematic if done without sufficient knowledge of how the 
parser and lexer work), we collaborated on defining the _problem_ with 
sufficient rigour?  That is, identifying what the syntax needs to achieve and 
how the current syntax fails.

In this case, the problem might include that the syntax needs an unambiguous way 
to indicate whether a command applies to a preceding or subsequent note or 
entity; an unambiguous way to group together entities (including commands) so 
that other commands can be applied to them collectively; a way to indicate 
direction where this matters; and so on.  I'm deliberately _not_ being rigorous 
at this point, but I think you get the idea.

Then, once the problem _is_ rigorously defined and agreed upon, you and the 
others who understand the technical issues could propose a solution, and we 
could provide feedback in terms of usability, whether it actually _does_ solve 
the problem we face and so on, and so evolve towards a solution.