OT: 'conduct unbecoming of a hacker'

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 04:27:43 UTC, Laeeth Isharc 
wrote:
> Joakim:
> "Pretty funny that he chose Stallman as his example of a guy 
> who gets stuff done, whose Hurd microkernel never actually got 
> done, :) though certainly ambitious, so Stallman would never 
> have had a FOSS OS on which to run his GNU tools if it weren't 
> for Linus."
>
> No - I think he used Stallman as an example of someone who 
> although he whined a lot actually did a hell of a lot of work 
> even so and became the change in the world he wanted.  In my 
> view productivity isn't about how many projects you don't 
> manage to finish, but how many you do get done, and I am not 
> sure I am in a position to criticize Stallman from that 
> perspective

He got some stuff done, which I alluded to, but his big project 
to build an OS on which to run his tools didn't.

> even if his ideological approach isn't entirely my cup of tea, 
> I do recognize he played a critical role there that was 
> necessary.

Eh, there were always the BSDs and essentially nobody runs GNU 
code today.  Android, that big open-source success, comes with 
almost no GNU code, just the linux kernel from Linus and company 
and a bunch of Apache-licensed code.  A lot of the BSD guys went 
to work at Apple, where they have now spread the 
permissively-licensed Darwin base of OS X and iOS to more than a 
billion devices, along with llvm and other permissively-licensed 
projects.

Stallman's GNU/GPL effort has largely failed, so he was clearly 
neither critical nor necessary.  Was he important, as a vocal 
proponent of FOSS early on?  Perhaps, but things would likely 
have progressed this way regardless, as his extremist, 
quasi-religious preaching of "free software" is largely dying 
out.  That religious fervor may even have hurt as much as it 
helped early on, as that collaborative model only really took off 
after the more business-friendly rebranding as "open source," 
which has also led to a move to more permissive licenses, ie not 
the GPL.

My point is that people see the success of open source and his 
early role as a vocal proponent and assume he was "critical," 
when the truth is more complicated, as his extreme formulation of 
completely "free software" has not done that well.

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 at 05:31:54 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
> So, I'm not necessarily saying that it should have been 
> accepted - but I can definitely understand how frustrating it 
> is for those who worked on it over the course of several months 
> to have it rejected (as far as I can tell) simply because it is 
> "too complicated". This is non-constructive in the sense that 
> it is a subjective judgment which does not point the way to a 
> better solution.
>
> As of today, the "Study" group for safe reference-counting 
> doesn't appear to be going much of anywhere, because Walter and 
> Andrei have rejected the DIP69 approach without having a real 
> alternative in hand. (DIP77 seems better than nothing to me, 
> but has not been well-received by those in the community who 
> are most invested in, and most knowledgeable of, memory 
> management issues.)

I'll note that not knowing a better solution doesn't mean one 
must simply accept the solution at hand, especially if that 
temporary solution will be difficult to unwind later.  Sometimes 
you simply need more time to come up with something better.  It 
all depends on the scale of the project and the suitability of 
the solution presented; you cannot simply say that "some" 
solution is better than nothing, as the original quoted post does.

But yeah, maybe the reasons for rejection can be communicated 
better.

> In the spirit of the original post, perhaps what is needed is 
> simply for someone to fork DMD and implement DIP69, so that 
> people can actually try it instead of just imagining it. That's 
> a lot of time and effort to invest though, knowing that your 
> work will most likely be rejected for purely subjective reasons.

This is why you should generally only work on something you 
actually need, which is a great discipline.  Even if it's 
rejected, you can code it up and use it yourself, though that's 
not always possible with certain language changes and DIPs.

For example, I asked about ARM and mobile support for D in 2011, 
noting that mobile was starting to take off and that people had 
been asking for ARM support periodically for years even prior to 
that.  I was told it was one of many priorities, but nobody knew 
when it'd be worked on.  Two years later, seeing mobile still 
hadn't been done (though others had gotten ldc/gdc working on 
linux/ARM to some extent), I took it up and, along with Dan, 
alpha releases for iOS and Android are now listed on the main 
download page.

It doesn't matter to me if nobody here uses D on mobile- though I 
certainly think that would be a huge missed opportunity- as _I_ 
want to use D on Android and now I can.

While this is not generalizable for all D PRs, ie nobody wants to 
maintain a fork of certain language features, it is for pretty 
much everything in druntime/phobos and some even do it for dmd.  
Caring enough about a change to code it yourself is a good test 
for whether it is worth doing, which is one point the original 
post alludes to.