You sound kind of arrogant in your last line.
Lol, I didn't mean for it to sound arrogant. I wrote it as a very long winded question/observation thing, but I shortened to like one sentence so it maybe ended up a bit weird. I mean, there's a lot of people I know who seriously avoid placeholders... because everything would rely on it.
Like with the attributes, every single formula that relies on the placeholder will have to be changed. That is seriously a lot of work and I'm wondering how he sees which should be worked on, which should be avoided, and which have little workarounds for now. Developers who rely on placeholders seem to aim for the short term and Toady seems to be the only one who can pull them out and replace them for a long term project.
And when they do get changed (like in the next version) it seems that a lot of change happens at once. Somehow Toady seems to know exactly what he wants to replace and when. What's interests me is that everything seems like it's mapped down and planned, but there's just so fricking much, in so many places that it seems impossible to map.
He picks what he does by what he wants to do. It's done when it's done sort of deal for time.
That's sort of what interests me. He like pops in Core 3, then Core 75, then 22 and such. In a sense, it's like an artisan trying to build a massive wonder, but he does it alone and builds the roof, the wall, some pillar, and builds another wall, engraves some art on it, removes the placeholder pillar and replaces it with a nicer one once he decides what the pillars should look like.
That's impressive for a small project, but amazing that he can do it with something the scope of DF and not create a mass or have the whole thing collapse when he changes something. Planning a big game alone is an impressive feat.. building it while you're still planning it is even more so.