Comment by bliti
11 years ago
Me too. Stumbling upon a webring while randomly traveling through geocities and then spending hours discovering. I would email the webmasters directly with questions and they'd answer. Oh and perl. Getting lost in perl webrings without knowing the language too well but managing to run some scripts here and there...Now days its just pull requests on github that require me to run a docker instance and install 500 packages for a hello world. Also, people used to discuss programming languages more openly. I'd spend hours reading about crack pot ideas to improve/extend BASIC. Then more hours emailing the authors of such ideas with questions. Now I can't even open an issue on github with questions about the architecture of a javascript library. Or mention how ugly Go is without getting hate email for weeks...
A lot of the spirit you mention and miss seems to be alive and well in the Clojure community. There's a lot of enthusiasm for old-fashioned hacking, improve/extend discussions, just fun times a lot of the time. I don't get that as much when interacting with, say, the JS community, or any other than I can think of. The Clojurescript community in particular is a really experimental bunch, with high energy (and many of their experiments have reached #1 here on HN in recent weeks).
I'll make sure to revisit Clojure again, thank you. Any specific recommendation as to where to start looking?