On 10/31/2015 12:10 PM, Robert Ramey wrote:
On 10/31/15 4:50 AM, John Maddock wrote:
Also intrigued, but also have other things to do.... would be easy for this to feature creep into a compile-time algebra library!
I think it would be hard to keep out. Also I think it would be very difficult to keep it from growing.
I'm actually more concerned about the demand for such a thing. I think it's very compelling. But as a member of the Program Committee for CPPcon 2015 I was very much struck by the lack of interest in topics related to mathematics and mathematical thinking. In particular there was a proposal for Algorithmic Differentiation implemented via TMP. In spite of strong advocacy on my part, other committee members were convinced that it was too advanced mathematically for the expected attendees. They might well have been right - if they were - it's even more disturbing to me.
One thing that we really, really, really need in Boost is better feedback on which libraries are actually used and how much they are used. I feel like we're spending a lot of time developing stuff that few if any programmers actually find useful. Sometimes they're right and the ideas just aren't that useful and other times they're wrong and they're just don't get it.
This goes double for the C++ committee. How is it that years of effort and discussion and development can be invested in "Concepts" while getting Boost authors to include "concepts" in their documentation and boost concept checking in their code is like pulling teeth.
Perhaps because "concepts" are not part of C++ and unless concepts become codified Boost authors have nothing to work with in adding "concepts" to their library.
I feel like I'm really missing something.