Comment by mncharity

Years back I attended someone doing an NSF outreach tour in support of Next Generation Science Standards. She was breathtaking (literally - bated breath on "how is that question going to be handled?!?"). Heartfelt hostile misguided questions, too confused to even attain wrong, somehow got responses which were, not merely positive and compassionate, but which managed to gracefully pull out constructive insights for the audience and questioner. One of those "How do I learn this? Can I be your apprentice?" moments.

The Wikipedia community (at least 2 decades back) was also notable. You have a world of nuttery making edits. The person off their meds going article by article adding a single letter "a". And yet a community ethos that emphasized dealing with them with gentle compassion, and as potential future positive contributors.

Skimming a recent "why did perl die" thread, one thing I didn't see mentioned... The perl community lacked the cultural infrastructure to cope with the eternal-September of years of continuous newcomer questions, becoming burned out and snarky. The python community emphasized it's contrast with this, "If you can't answer with friendly professionalism, we don't need your reply today" (or something like that).

Moving from tar files with mailing lists, to now community repos and git and blogs/slack/etc, there's been a lot of tech learned. For example, Ruby's Gems repo was explicitly motivated by "don't be python" (then struggling without a central community repo). But there's also been the social/cultural tech learned, for how to do OSS at scale.

> My only doubt is whether this has a good or bad effect overall

I wonder if a literature has developed around this?