Are there / should there be venues for analyzing mistakes in previous specifications?

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1

Surely there are examples of specification details that "got past the goalie" so to speak. Making those mistakes known, analyzing why they got through, and adjusting processes accordingly would be a useful exercise both in terms of accountability and community education. I've been googling around looking for any such "postmortem" explicitly tied to the comity, but I have been unsuccessful thus far.

For example, the language feature that originally motivated my question is default exports. I don't think it's important to adjudicate my opinions about default exports here, but I was surprised to see that no content has been published by the comity discussing whether the inclusion of default exports in es6 was ultimately a good decision. I think it would be useful for teams creating style guides and beneficial to the quality of the language over time if these topics were addressed officially.

2

Because that is a very subjective opinion that the committee wouldn’t be able to gain consensus on in either direction. There’s nonzero people on the committee that regret const, class, and many other features.

3

That's great- I want to hear more about those disagreements :grin:, though I'll grant most people probably don't care much about the most extreme cases. I don't expect consensus, but if even a plurality of the comity ever comes to regret a particular decision I think that's material information for everyone outside the comity

4

While you can certainly locate and/or solicit opinions from past or present committee members, It's extremely unlikely that you'll get any kind of "official" comment like this - we couldn't even agree to recommend semicolons.

5

Cool- this response makes sense and is realistically about what I was expecting to hear back :+1:. I encourage any kind of "posthoc dissenting opinion" writing that might come from comity members in the future, but I'll also stop bugging you about it here