Iterators, generators, finally, and scarce resources (Was: April 10 2014 Meeting Notes)

[Brendan Eich]

Domenic Denicola wrote:
> Dave and Andy's responses have me pinging back and forth as to which "side" I'm on.

Are you off the fence yet? I can't tell :-P.

> But inconvenience is easily solved via MOAR SUGAR:
>
> ```js
> for (var line using files) {
>    if (line == '-- mark --') {
>      break;
>    }
> }
> ```

No, that's syntactic salt. It will be forgotten when needed. It mixes 
with sugar (for-of) to leave a bad taste. It bloats surface syntax.

The reason to revive close as return is convenience. It's a good reason 
when fully rationalized. Yes, scenario solving and uncompositional 
primitives are bad in general. But as Dave argues, the specific case 
survives by the full rationale given.

> I'd rather give the ecosystem another year or so without a standard dispose protocol, if it means we avoid making changes to ES6 this late in the game.

That's not a good argument, compared to the now-or-never one Mark made. 
Indeed with rapid release, penalizing convenience and waiting for 
ecosystem effects can make overcomplicated, convenient, and just bad 
total designs out of piecewise steps that you might like because they 
avoid committing to convenience :-P.

Design is an art still (Knuth: we can't teach a computer to do it). 
Robo-processes and ecosystem robots from the future do not replace it.

/be