[ whoops, this was intended to be a private reply… ]
> On Jan 18, 2021, at 10:35 AM, Brian Goetz <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> So how do i know if something is a corner case or not ?
>
> It’s a fair question, but I have a fair answer: ask clarifying questions! If
> i could give you one bit of advice (applicable beyond just this situation),
> it would be: “less certainty, more inquiry.” I spend a *lot* of time on
> these writeups, whose sole purpose is to enable productive discussion. To
> the extent the write-ups don’t make something clear, ask. There’s nothing
> wrong with saying “I don’t understand that …”
>
>> Again, at least in my case, the problem is not if this direction is garbage
>> or not but that i don't fully understand the document you sent to us.
>
> That’s fine. But you use words that seem to imply “this direction is
> garbage.” You may not mean to, but you frequently use words like “wrong” or
> “that’s not what you want, what you want is…”, very early in the discussion,
> before you’ve even fully internalized what I’m proposing. When the document
> is solely about the direction, and you say “this is wrong”, you are saying
> the direction is wrong. I get that this isn’t how you mean it to come off,
> but it does.
>
> This may be a cultural thing; for example, in english, “impossible” means
> “contrary to the laws of physics”, and in French, my understanding is that it
> means “that would be inconvenient for me.” But Americans are offended by
> this, because when something is clearly possible (“can I wait at the table
> for my companion to arrive”) and we are told it is “impossible”, one feels
> like one is being told that up is down, or black is white. Again, the cure
> for this is “less certainty, more inquiry.”
>
>> Questions like what is the relationship between a deconstruction pattern and
>> a static pattern ? Is there several form of static patterns ? What a guard
>> is ? etc.
>> All these questions are important to understand the document you have sent.
>
> Yes. In some sense, that is what I thought the paper was about, so if those
> didn’t come through clearly, I didn’t do my job 100%, and you should ask
> clarifying questions until you get what I’m proposing. (Constructively and
> politely, of course.) At that point, you might agree or disagree or might
> feel that I skipped some parts, and then it makes sense to discuss those
> things. But, if I write a paper about the big picture, I would rather not
> move onto syntax or translation or performance until we at least are in sync
> on what big picture is being proposed, its pros and cons, and an
> understanding of where the picture gets fuzzy.
>
> For a topic as big as patterns, I have tried very hard to break things into
> chunks that are small enough to be discussed, but big enough to cover one
> area. The granularity varies, I wrote an as-large doc about exhaustiveness,
> which is surely a corner case (but a complex one.) But here, I am proposing
> an ambitious notion of pattern matching in Java, more so than Scala and C#,
> and I’d like people to understand what I’m trying to achieve before they
> start proposing alternatives fro various aspects (which may not fit into the
> bigger picture at all.) I don’t think I can break it down much further
> without losing sight of the goal.
