Show HN: The Room – a novel about life inside the C++ standards committee

vinniefalco

I wrote this after asking myself: if my paper is correct, why do I have to fly halfway around the world to present it in person? I studied political science, game theory, and voting dynamics, and concluded that the committee evaluates people rather than papers - social evaluation is cheaper than technical evaluation when 500 papers compete and delegates read a handful fully. This insight forms the foundation of my novel. Committee delegates are a group of smart, well-meaning people that slowly lost the ability to say "no" to anything. Features, working groups, scope, everything added, nothing sculpted. The book is my attempt to name that failure mode and the roles people fall into around it. It is opinionated and it is one practitioner's view, so I am mostly interested in where it is wrong. I handed out 100 hardcopies of this book at the WG21 meeting in Brno, Czech Republic so that the committee could sit with it before it was released to the general public. It is free, in PDF and eBook formats. I’m working on making hardcopies available for the people who want something collectible. The mechanism could be general. I’m curious if it matches IETF / W3C / ISO / Rust-RFC experience or not. I use machine assisted drafting in my writing process and I am happy to talk about exactly how; my words here are my own. What I would most like feedback on: are these observations specific to C++ or is it a universal property of volunteer expert bodies?

anametocome

There is A LOT here!