Trip notes from Israel

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On 5/22/17 6:53 PM, cym13 wrote:
> On Monday, 22 May 2017 at 15:05:24 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> http://dlang.org/blog/2017/05/22/introspection-introspection-everywhere/ 
>> -- Andrei
> 
> Now that you are back and could take some time to think this over, would 
> you say your trip will influence how you see D's and the D community 
> evolution? In what way?

In several ways. To an extent it was a confirmation of things already 
known: We do well on things we focus on (language core, standard 
library, quality of implementation), and less so on things we focus less 
on (soft skills, community building, leadership). I got a clearer notion 
that the latter is an important ingredient.

One thing that several of those people emphasized is we need to improve 
leadership and decision. "You are trying to do democracy and democracy 
doesn't work here" (by a successful serial entrepreneur). Walter and I 
have implicitly fostered a kind of meritocracy whereby it's the 
point/argument that matters. It should be meritocracy of the person - 
good proven contributors have more weight and new people must prove 
themselves before aspiring to influence. Historically, anyone with any 
level of involvement with D could hop on the forum and engage the 
community and its leadership in debate. Subsequently, they'd be 
frustrated with the ensuing disagreement and also get a sense of 
cheapness - if I got to carry this unsatisfactory debate with the 
language creator himself, what kind of an operation is this?

Since anything can be debated by anyone, everything gets debated by 
everyone. Anyone can question any decision at any time and expect a 
response. It's the moral equivalent of everyone in a 5000-person company 
building can expect to stop the CEO on the way to his/her office and 
engage them in a conversation of any length. The net consequence is 
slower progress.

Where we need to be is fostering strong contributions and contributors. 
The strength of one's say is multiplied by his/her contributions (and 
that simply means pulled PRs, successful DIPs - not "won" debates). Many 
successful OSS projects have been quoted as implementing this policy 
successfully.

Every person in the room took a significant fraction of the meeting time 
to tear me a new one about dub and http://code.dlang.org. Each in a 
different place :o). I got to the point where I consider every day spent 
with code.lang.org just sitting there with no ranking, no statistics, no 
voting, no notion of what are the good projects to look at - every such 
day is a liability for us. We really need to improve on that, it is of 
utmost importance and urgency. Martin said he'll be on that in June, but 
we could really use more hands on deck there.

Documentation of vibe.d was also mentioned as an important problem. More 
precisely, it's the contrast between the quality of the project and that 
of the documentation - someone said his team ended up with a different 
(and arguably inferior) product that was better documented. Literally 
they had the same engineer try each for a day. Reportedly it was very 
difficult to even figure whether vibe.d does some specific thing, let 
alone tutorials and examples of how to do it.

Back to community: Successful OSS projects have a hierarchy and follow 
formalized paths and processes for communicating up and down. People are 
willing to work/wait for months on a proposal because they have a sense 
of process and a confidence their proposal, if properly done, will get a 
fair shake. These are good ideas to follow (and indeed I got more 
confirmation that investing in our new DIP process is a good thing to do).

We need to improve the collaboration and tone in the forums and github. 
(I was amazed at how well these business and community leaders knew 
who's who in our community.) We can only assume in the future people 
will peruse our forums/github to decide whether to use D in their 
enterprise. We need to improve on the current disposition toward 
fruitless debate not concluding in decision making. What hurts us the 
most and stands like a sore thumb is the occasional use of abusive 
language. We need to stop that.

Many of these things I had a good sense of before entering the meeting, 
and was on the way toward improving on them. The meeting provided a 
strong confirmation of the importance of these matters, and good ideas 
toward doing better.


Andrei