Comment by cemerick
7 years ago
Rather than reply to any of the various downthread issues, just a few clarifications:
* I don't know exactly who Rich is responding to, but I can't imagine it's for rando users who drop off drive-by TODOs for maintainers. More likely IMO it's in response to a number of people who have contributed significantly to clojure itself and to supporting projects and resources that have spoken up in recent times with various critiques.
* I'm super uncomfortable with any comparison to this kind of "dispute" as being anything like that between parents, etc., though I can see how some might think of it like that. Really, it's a disconnect of expectations and a lack of communication, which I'm glad has been resolved definitively.
* I do still use Clojure (though more via ClojureScript than otherwise), it's just not my primary rig anymore, and I'm strictly a user. The contribution process was a minor factor, not the driving rationale for my looking elsewhere; though, as I said in the posted tweets, I surely wouldn't have tarried so long if I knew earlier what I know now.
Thanks Chas for responding. Apologies for the parents metaphor if that made you feel uncomfortable - since at the time of my writing lots of comments on gist and HN were concurring with Rich and talking about "weeding out toxic personalities" I was just trying to come up with a metaphor that would offer a different perspective - that this is a type of disconnect that benefits no one and that there is no side that is clearly "good" or "bad" since all sides are needed for the whole ecosystem to work. Rich's statement was aimed at some core contributors (I am guessing now probably a bit more at Tim and less at your follow up tweet) and that worries me. Imho this situation is a lose-lose scenario: for Cognitect to lose contributors, for contributors to have spent hundreds/thousands of hours in vain and for anyone from clojure community who placed his bet on clojure and invested substantial time in learning/using/evangelizing it (affecting his/her market value in the process). Anyway thanks for all the work on clojure! I am still using some of your clojure libraries!
Normal people who are using the software to get something done just maintain a local fork where they can fix fires as fast as they want, then treat upstreaming (if any) as a background task that is allowed to take the necessary time.
E.g. numerous GNU/Linux distros maintain local patches for numerous packages: kernel, gcc, glibc, ... Some of these take years to get upstreamed, if at all.
The problem is that this process doesn't work so well for people who just want to leave their imprint on that project (that one and only official project, not their private fork).
Saying I'm not going to use this as my main tool if I can't have a more or less free reign in shaping the destiny of its one and only official version comes across as a bit of an infantile tantrum.
You clearly didn't read even my post you're replying to, nevermind being aware of the rest of the story/context.