Generality creep

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/31/19 10:12 AM, bachmeier wrote:
> It is clear that he has no interest in being the leader of an open 
> source project. He doesn't want to waste his time with average 
> programmers, he only wants to spend his time working with the best of 
> the best (by some metric) software engineers.

Good leadership is inspiring people from all walks of life toward doing 
extraordinary things. Point being, not all need to be extraordinary. 
Groups of extraordinary people working together do happen, but are rare 
enough to receive their own phrase - "Gang of Four", "Paypal Mafia", "K&R".

I knew this well before embarking on working on D, and I had no illusion 
about my own skill being remarkable to start with. So I had no 
unreasonable expectations going in or staying in.

What was surprising, which I alluded to in another post, is that the 
advice for improvement I'd dispense was frequently debated and 
occasionally taken as an offense. For whatever reason, I failed to hold 
the competence high ground. It's as if there was a samizdat manual by 
which contributors must do two essential things - antagonize Walter and 
debate my reviews. Needless to say, my growing testy didn't help one 
bit. There's this subtle Romanian proverb translated loosely as "it's 
mighty difficult helping who doesn't want to be helped". (I first heard 
it thirty years ago in the military and thought it's kind of silly.)

This has led to many thousand yard stare evenings I have yet to recover 
from.