The forked elephant in the room

[Dukc]

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 20:51:48 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>
> Yes, that's certainly true.
>
> My intent is not to focus on Adam Ruppe's case specifically, 
> but on the broader pattern that also includes former 
> contributors like Sebastian Wilzbach, Jonathan Marler, 
> ag0aep6g, Suleyman Sahmi (SSoulaimane), etc. When one 
> relationship fails, that's unfortunate. When a long string of 
> relationships fail in the same way, that's a sign of a deeper 
> problem.
>
> Even if we grant that there was nothing more to be done in 
> Adam's case, I think D's approach to contributor relationships 
> is leaving a lot of value on the table.

I get the impression that these kinds of problems are more of a 
rule than an exception in succesful open-source projects though 
(by succesful I mean attracting dozens of contributors or more). 
Looking at the lobse.rs discussion Guillaume posted, Hacker news 
discussion about OpenD and considering what you hear about say 
Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt, strong enthusiasm to contribute 
seems to go hand in hand with a strong personality. I think 
keeping those kinds of contributors is simply hard. It might not 
be that hard for an average Joe were he leading, but I suspect 
the same qualities that make language creators succesful in the 
first place tend to make good leadership in these cases hard for 
them.

I don't think D leadership is doing particulary badly - otherwise 
they would be developing the compiler alone by now. But sure it's 
still a critical thing that might well determine the future 
between stagnation and an explosion in popularity. Therefore 
you're right we ought to pay attention to it, however 
understandable the problems are.