I understand your frustration. But it is important to note that timeliness and feedback are a two-way street. There was a time when changes to Clojure were tried immediately by users, and I'd know within hours if not minutes if I'd introduced something that caused problems for someone. That matters as much to me now as it did then. But now it can be months or, as in this case, years before someone issues a complaint. That's quite frustrating as well.
It is equally important that we continue to presume the best of one another. I've had to reconcile myself to the fact that Clojure users are busy using Clojure, and primarily from release artifacts. They have less time to spend evaluating the latest code. I, too, am busy using Clojure, something that is quite good for Clojure, even though it may give me less time for participating in the threads. Rest assured that the threads are being seen and considered. If you've had someone from core chime in on a thread (as Stu did, the day after your first post), then it's been seen. He and I have spoken about it several times. That doesn't mean it's become an action item, even if there's a long thread (long threads can mean little more than everyone has an opinion), or that the majority seems to agree (people happy with how things are are least motivated to chime in). The fact is, this was very old code, and if someone was catching fire because of it, presumably it would have come up already. That said, I am very interested in the idea of getting more leverage out of the JIRA voting system. As the volume on the lists and in JIRA etc continues to grow (as it does), triage becomes critical, and more difficult. Any effort to organize and prioritize the work and opinions of the community is much appreciated (thanks Andy, et al). Voting can be a self-serve, self-tuning option. I've already made a JIRA view that orders tickets by votes. It will be essential though, that people be limited (or, more likely, limit themselves) to e.g. 3 active votes (i.e. on open tickets) at a time, else it's not triage, it's just a venting exercise :) The simple fact is that people's desire to work with a stable Clojure, and to continue to produce a solid one, coupled with a growing community, means that things will take longer, and not everything can be personally addressed. Rich On Sep 3, 2012, at 9:06 PM, Mark Engelberg wrote: > In the early days of Clojure, it was clear that Rich was reading every post > on the Clojure mailing list. He didn't respond to every single thread, of > course, but when new issues were raised, he would frequently chime in, > "That's a good point, please create a patch for that" or "That's something > that's never going to change." > > This created a clear path for bug reports, feature requests, and improvement > suggestions. Basically, the path was to post on the mailing list. If it was > something that had been already discussed in the past, one could count on the > community to point to the relevant thread. If it was something new, one > could count on it eventually being evaluated by Rich and an official judgment > made. The community was instructed not to submit any kind of patch without a > go-ahead from Rich. > > I don't know what the path is now. I feel that in the past year, there have > been several times where people have raised meaningful issues about Clojure > and received no official response. It's hard to know whether this is an > intentional "rejection through ignoring", or whether it's just that those > messages happened to slip beneath the radar. Maybe Rich didn't see them, and > without his go-ahead, no one moved forward with them. > > As a recent example, consider the issue I raised last month about sets, which > in 1.3 were changed so that via several methods of construction (either > literal notation or the hash-set constructor), they now throw an error, > breaking code that previously worked, reducing the utility of set notation, > and imposing on users the need to remember the idiosyncrasies of which > methods of set construction impose this constraint and which don't. The > majority of those who weighed in on the issue agreed with my complaint. > > The set issue was even discussed on the Mostly Lazy podcast as an example of > how, even though Clojure gets a lot of the "big ideas" right, there seem to > be a lot of "little things" that Clojure still hasn't nailed. > > In any case, there was a great deal of useful discussion about the set issue, > and then... silence. > > There are a couple of points here: > > 1. I use Clojure regularly. The "little things" may be little, but when you > use Clojure regularly, those little things do start to grate after a while. > I would very much like to see Clojure on a path to resolve the little things, > so that the language becomes increasingly pleasurable to use. To do this, > the community would benefit for a very clear mechanism for raising, > discussing, evaluating, and resolving these issues. The "hope that Rich > reads the thread" approach doesn't appear to be working any more. For > example, on whitehouse.gov, you can start a petition and if enough people > sign the petition within a given length of time, the president's office will > issue an official statement about it. That's the kind of thing I'm thinking > about. Rich's time is valuable, but it would be nice to know that any issue > that reaches a certain level of visibility will receive an official "yea" or > "nay" rather than languish in silence. > > 2. There was significant support for my suggestion to revert set behavior > back to 1.2 and solve the problem which motivated the change by bringing > array-maps into accord with the behavior of the other maps and sets. This > email is also my way of bumping the thread and bringing it again to > everyone's attention. This is something I'd very much like to see resolved. > > --Mark > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your > first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
