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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I've read the original article and, to be quite honest, couldn't actually determine what point it was trying to make. The action items seemed to have very little to do with the rest of the rant.

I actually read the response first and the weird thing is: I couldn't really tell you what exactly the response is replying to. I feel like the whole thing is a huge amount of verbiage expressing frustration and broken motives but any actual solid facts mentioned are peripheral at best to what's being said.

I could write multiple pages on how I fell out of love with Clojure but I doubt it would benefit anyone and it'd be a huge pain to do.

Clojure is the product of a singular aesthetic, for better or worse.

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>, couldn't actually determine what point it was trying to make.

In the poorly written Chris Zheng rant, there was a link to a more mature blog post by Eric Normand.[1] (It would have been better use of Rich Hickey's time to ignore CZ and respond to Eric, but alas.)

In any case, CZ is upset that Cognitec drives the evolution of Clojure and its libraries more than the community outside of Cognitec. E.g. one of his frameworks he liked (Noir) was ignored while Cognitec pushed its own.

Here's my question, what mainstream programming language community actually meets CZ's criteria that the outside community drives the language with equal or more power than the internal team? It's certainly not Golang (Rob Pike, Brad Fitzgerald, Ross Cox, etc), nor C# (A Heilsberg, et al), nor Clang (Apple devs). Yes, they have github repos but the pull requests from outsiders is not the same priority as the internal teams agenda. Which language & community actually meets CZ's ideal?

[1] http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure

Ruby is an example for sure, Haskell is another.

I don't know if it has changed recently, but for many years the core team for Ruby were all Japanese, and most of their conversations were in Japanese, and so almost nobody in the wider Ruby / Rails community had any visibility or influence on the language's development.

Right, but that is just the language and VM implementation. The most important libraries in Ruby are not written by the core team who supports the VM.

And they rejected a couple of his pull requests and implemented similar features themselves.

I don't think it's necessarily the responsibility of a project to validate its users. But there are examples like Node where the emphasis is on retaining and involving contributors.

https://medium.com/the-node-js-collection/healthy-open-sourc...

I'm not sure it fits everywhere but based on later posts, it seems to be working for them.

Though Node is run that way mainly because the pressure of io.js — specifically forked because Node wasn’t being run in a collaborative manner. Was an interesting time, with an excellent outcome.

mainstream

That's a weasel-word. For all we know, you could be using it as a synonym for a programming language community that's controlled by a corporation. Then your whole argument would be a tautology.

Rust is extremely community driven. The main team does work and had input. But they respond to community requests with an openness and a speed that is rare.

Sad thing is...Noir was dead for 4 years before Arachne came along. Go to the GitHub page, the deprication notice is from 2013! And Arachne isn’t even a Cognitect project. The author of Arachne temporarily quit his job at Cognitect to peruse his dream of a ideal web framework.

The number of facts like this that at just plain wrong in the OP just add to the offensive tone. Why should I listen to someone who has no respect for they truth?

Speaking of the truth -- http://arachne-framework.org/team/:

  Tim Ewald **
  Bob Calco ***
  Jamie Kite **
  Jay Martin
  David Nolen *
  Mike Nygard *
  Russ Olsen *
  Marc Phillips
  Nola Stowe
  Stuart Sierra *
  Luke VanderHart *
  ---
  (honorable mention) _halgari == Tim Baldridge *
  
    * Currently @ Cognitect
   ** Ex-Cognitect
  *** Affiliated (https://cognitect.com/services.html)

shoot for the stars and if you miss, at least you've reached the moon.

> what mainstream programming language community actually meets CZ's criteria that the outside community drives the language with equal or more power than the internal team?

I'd suggest Perl might get close to that.

Not even close. There's a tiny cabal of regionally and racially well connected people, most of them working in the same company, who do make the (mostly wrong) decisions.

The original article doesn't make much sense to me either. It's just a weird rant.

I love Clojure and many of its libraries, but I think there are some aspects inhibiting its growth. Here they cover a few of these aspects:

http://www.lispcast.com/cognitect-clojure

It worries me a bit, since I would really like to have a practical Lisp that is on par with other mainstream languages in terms of tools, libraries and community. Clojure is quite healthy now, but some items need to be addressed in order not to fall behind.

I'm also quite enthusiastic about Racket getting to run on top of Chez Scheme, which may give it a bit of momentum. Besides, Clasp, with its LLVM capabilities, is the most promising Common Lisp to me right now. Sadly, it's mostly one-man project and the whole Common Lisp scene is a bit stagnant.

To me the original article read as an expression of frustration - the sort of feelings that are easy to understand but hurtful and frankly stupid to put out in public.

The comparison to a relationship with a girl out of your league really makes him come off as a bit of a twat straight off the bat.

oh man... meta-trolling is amazing.

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