Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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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

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.

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.

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

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

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