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Comment by blacktriangle | Hacker News Reader

This story at face value is so far beyond what is necessary for a code of conduct to address. From the author's description, nobody is defending Felleisen, the project has just decided that they are better off with him regardless of his assholeness than they are without him. Whether that is true or not is up for debate.

This is not a CoC issue, this is an issue of enforcement, and in the absence of enforcement a CoC isn't worth the paper its written on.

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This is absolutely the key point, and the one that all the discussion here is missing. Nobody defends Matthias' behavior, they just suggest that you should tolerate or ignore it. The reason is clear when you realize that "the Racket community" is more-or-less analogous with "Matthias' academic descendants." The people who are working on Racket as a language owe immense professional debts to Matthias.

> "the Racket community" is more-or-less analogous with "Matthias' academic descendants."

For people who don't know, the Racket project was started by Matthias Felleisen in the early '90s. The next people on the project were all his PhD students:

- Matthew Flatt

- Robby Findler

- Shriram Krishnamurthi

- Cormac Flanagan

Later additions who are top contributors to github.com/racket/racket:

- Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Felleisen's student)

- Jay McCarthy (Krishnamurthi's student)

- Vincent St-Amour (Felleisen's student)

- Ryan Culpepper (Felleisen's student)

- Asumu Takikawa (Felleisen's student)

- Eric Dobson (Krishnamurthi's undergraduate student)

In the top 10 contributors listed on GitHub, only 2 are not academic descendants of Felleisen:

- Eli Barzilay

- Matthias Felleisen

EDIT: I originally listed Eric Dobson as "not an academic descendant of Felleisen" because I hadn't been able to find information on a dissertation or the like, but a comment informed me that they were an undergraduate student of Krishnamurthi so I have updated the comment to reflect this.

> In the top 10 contributors listed on GitHub, only 3 are not academic descendants of Felleisen:

Eric Dobson and I were undergrads studying under Shriram. I don't contribute to Racket, but it has nothing to do with Felleisen being an asshole.

Ah, apologies for the misinformation. I had tried to find information on Dobson's academic background and came up blank, so I assumed they weren't in academia (and, thus, no direct connection to Felleisen). Thank you for the correction!

And the last remaining not-Matthias person on your list, while not an academic descendent of his, (to the best of my knowledge) owes their current employment to Matthias' politicking.

Codes of conduct are good for more nuanced cases; if you’ve got behavior that would fall under a very generic “don’t be an asshole” type rule, the problem you’ve got is an enforcement issue not a documenation issue.

> the project has just decided that they are better off with him regardless of his assholeness than they are without him.

A CoC is at least in theory a commitment to not make such a decision.

Sure, but the core team already knows about this, and already knows that it's bad. If they had signed a pledge to not tolerate bad things back in 2019 when CoCs were cool I'm not sure how that would change anything. More ways for people to play at rules lawyering?

Indeed, soviet russia had the freedom of speech in its constitution.

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