On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 01:28:37 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
On 10/2/18 4:34 AM, Joakim wrote:
On Tuesday, 2 October 2018 at 09:39:14 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
On 10/1/18 11:26 PM, Joakim wrote:
[snip]
I disagree.
It is not clear what you disagree with, since almost nothing
you say has any bearing on my original post. To summarize, I
suggest changing the currently talk-driven DConf format to
either
1. a more decentralized collection of meetups all over the
world, where most of the talks are pre-recorded, and the focus
is more on introducing new users to the language or
2. at least ditching most of the talks at a DConf still held
at a central location, maybe keeping only a couple panel
discussions that benefit from an audience to ask questions,
and spending most of the time like the hackathon at the last
DConf, ie actually meeting in person.
This point has a subtle flaw. Many of the talks raise points of
discussion that would otherwise go without discussion, and
potentially unnoticed, if it were not for the person bringing
it up. The talks routinely serve as a launchpad for the nightly
dinner sessions. Benjamin Thauts 2016 talk about shared
libraries is one such example. Indeed every single year has
brought at least one (but usually more) talk that opened up
some new line of investigation for the dinner discussions.
I thought it was pretty obvious from my original post, since I
volunteered to help with the pre-recorded talks, but the idea is
to have pre-recorded talks no matter whether DConf is held in a
central location or not.
Since both of these alternatives I suggest are much more about
in-person interaction, which is what you defend, and the only
big change I propose is ditching the passive in-person talks,
which you do not write a single word in your long post
defending, I'm scratching my head about what you got out of my
original post.
There is much more to the conference than just a 4-day meetup
with talks. The idea that it's just the core 8-15 people with
a bunch of hangers-on is patently false. It's not about the
conversations I have with the "core" people. It's
Schveighoffer, or Atila, or Jonathan, or any of a long list
of people who are interested enough in coming. Remember these
people self-selected to invest non-trivial treasure to be
there, they are ALL worthy of conversing with.
Since both my mooted alternatives give _much more_ opportunity
for such interaction, I'm again scratching my head at your
reaction.
This is untrue. See responses further down.
It is true. You merely prefer certain interaction for yourself to
the overall interaction of the community.
Is it a "mini-vaction"? Yea, sure, for my wife. For her it's
a four day shopping spree in Europe. For me it's four days of
wall-to-wall action that leaves me drop-dead exhausted at the
end of the day.
So it's the talks that provide this or the in-person
interaction? If the latter, why are you arguing against my
pushing for more of it and ditching the in-person talks?
It's everything. The talks, the coding, the talking, the
drinking. All of it has some social component I find valuable.
Please try to stay on the subject. Nobody's talking about getting
rid of coding/talking/drinking, in fact, the idea is to have
_more_ time for those, by ditching the in-person talks.
So the relevant info here would be what you find "social" about
passively watching a talk in person with 100 other people in the
same room, which as usual, you don't provide.
Every time I see somebody predicting the end of "X" I roll my
eyes. I have a vivid memory of the rise of Skype and
videoconferencing in the early 2000's giving way to
breathless media reports about how said tools would kill the
airlines because people could just meet online for a trivial
fraction of the price.
People make stupid predictions all the time. Ignoring all such
"end of" predictions because many predict badly would be like
ignoring all new programming languages because 99% are bad.
That means you'd never look at D.
And yes, some came true: almost nobody programs minicomputers
or buys standalone mp3 players like the iPod anymore, compared
to how many used to at their peak.
Sure, but the predictions about videoconferencing have yet to
come true. As told but the data itself. The travel industry is
setting new records yearly in spite of videoconferencing.
That's not conjecture or opinion, go look for yourself. As I
have previously suggested, the stock prices and order-books of
Airbus and Boeing are are record highs. Airplanes are more
packed than ever (called load-factor). For example, Delta's
system-wide load-factor was 85.6% last year. Which means that
85.6% of all available seats for the entire year were occupied.
(Source:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/221085/passenger-load-factor-of-delta-air-lines/). Airlines are delivering entire planes for business travelers.
All of this demonstrates that videoconferencing has done
nothing to curb travel demand and the current data suggest that
it is unlikely too in the foreseeable future. That it might at
some point in the distant future is not relevant to this
discussion.
Yes, you know what is even more irrelevant to this discussion?
Your entire unrelated tangent about business travel versus
video-conferencing, which has essentially nothing to do with the
topic of this thread, ie what a good format for DConf would be.
However, it's 2018 and the airlines are reaping record
profits on the backs of business travelers (ask me how I
know). Airlines are even now flying planes with NO standard
economy seats for routes that cater specifically to business
travelers (e.g. Singapore Airlines A350-900ULR). The order
books (and stock prices) of both Airbus and Boeing are at
historic highs.
You know what is much higher? Business communication through
email, video-conferencing, online source control, etc. that
completely replaced old ways of doing things like business
travel or sending physical packages. However, business travel
might still be up- I don't know as I haven't seen the stats,
and you provide nothing other than anecdotes- because all that
virtual communication might have enabled much more
collaboration and trade that also grew business travel
somewhat.
The reason I lump business and conference travel together is
because that is precisely how the travel industry defines it.
Primarily due to the fact that businesses pay for the
overwhelming majority of conference travel. You may disagree
with that characterization, but that is how it's defined.
Again a wholly irrelevant point, as who cares how they define it?
Maybe if you presented some data on how the combined
business/conference travel miles has gone up but you have none,
and even then it would be spurious since we only care about the
conference portion for this thread.
And airlines kitting out entire airplanes for business travel
isn't an anecdote. It's a simple, and verifiable, fact that you
too could verify should you so choose. I provided you with all
the relevant data necessary to verify for yourself.
I see no data with which to "verify" it, another one of your
weird prevarications.
There are more conferences, attendees, and business travelers
than there has ever been in history, in spite of the great
technological leaps in videoconferencing technology in the
past two decades.
The market has spoken. Reports of the death of
business/conference travel have been greatly exaggerated.
You are conflating two completely different markets here,
business versus conference travel. Regarding conferences, your
experience contradicts that of the iOS devs in the post I
linked and the one he links as evidence, where that blogger
notes several conferences that have shut down. In your field,
it is my understanding that MS has been paring back and
consolidating their conferences too, though I don't follow MS
almost at all.
Yes, some conferences shutdown, but many more started up. Your
premise is that "Popular Conference X was shutdown so all
conferences are dead forevars!"
No, try actually reading the links I mentioned, he lists 10
Apple-related conferences that have shut down and says nothing
has replaced them.
In reality the attendance to conferences is going to depend on
the community it serves. For example, IOS has been getting
primarily cosmetic updates and bugfixes for the past few
cycles, but there really isn't much truly new tech that needs
to be communicated because what IOS does hasn't changed
significantly in years. In this case, a conference being moved
to a virtual environment with a limited number of presentations
my be the most effective course. This is not surprising, it is
the natural lifecycle of things.
Others report the same for other tech, including one guy in the
comments there who runs a javascript conference in South Africa.
For example, Microsoft killed PDC after 2008, only to bring
back a different, but related conference (Build) in 2011. Now
.NET has it's own virtual conference in Sept, but Build still
has a lot of .NET related content at Build, it's just the
Build's broader scope means that a lot of good content can't
make it in, so yea, virtual-conference for the content that
didn't make the cut. Microsoft took an incredible amount of
heat for canceling PDC. So they brought it back with a new name.
The point is that the MS ecosystem has been cutting back on
conferences also, just as I said.
But saying that because Apple did it for one of their
conferences (note that WWDC is still a thing) that all
conferences everywhere are dead is both prima facie ridiculous
and easily disproven.
No, what's easily disproven is that _nobody said it was only one
conference that shut down_.
The reason for this is fundamental to human psychology and,
as such, is unlikely to change in the future. Humans are
social animals, and no matter how hard we have tried, nothing
has been able to replace the face-to-face meeting for getting
things done. Be it the conversations we have over beers after
the talks, or the epic number of PR's that come out the
hackathon, or even mobbing the speaker after a talk.
It is funny that you say this on a forum where we're
communicating despite never having met "face-to-face,"
discussing a language where 99.999% of the work is done online
by people who don't need any "face-to-face" meetings to get
"things done." :)
Also, my suggestions are about enabling more face-to-face
time, not less, so there's that too.
Additionally, the conference serves other "soft" purposes.
Specifically, marketing and education. The conference
provides legitimacy to DLang and the Foundation both by it's
mere existence and as a venue for companies using DLang to
share their support (via sponsorships) or announce their
products (as seen by the Weka.io announcement at DConf 2018)
which further enhances the marketing of both the product
being launched and DLang itself.
Don't make me laugh: what part of this
marketing/legitimization couldn't be done at either of the two
alternatives I gave?
>> I have spoken to Walter about DConf numerous times. He has
nothing
against, and indeed actively encourages, local meetups. But
they do not serve the purpose that DConf does. My
understanding from my conversations with Walter is that the
primary purpose of DConf is to provide a venue that is open
to anyone interested to come together and discuss all things
D. He specifically does not want something that is only
limited to the "core" members. As this suggestion runs
precisely counter to the primary stated purpose of DConf it
is unlikely to gain significant traction from the D-BDFL.
Wrong, both of my suggestions fulfil that purpose _better_.
What they don't do is limit attendance to those who have the
passion _and_ can afford the time and money to travel 2-20
hours away to a single location, just so they can get all the
in-person benefits you claim.
You misunderstand my point. What you are asking for is the
balkanization of the community by splitting it up along
regional geographic boundaries. What you are demanding would
mean that we only ever meet the people from our specific
geographic regions. Not one of the people I listed is in my
geographic region. Therefore I would NEVER meet them, and
indeed, I never would have if not for DConf. This demand is
tribalism at it's worst.
First off, I never "demanded" anything. I have presented reasons
why the current format should be changed and said it makes a lot
of sense to change, so much so that not doing so would signal
negligence.
If you want to meet someone from a DConf location that's farther
away, nobody's forcing you to go to the local DConf: you can
always fly across the country to see Andrei and Steven in Boston.
Yes, you won't get to see all of the core team if they're not all
there, but I don't see why you're so obsessed with that. You
contribute almost nothing to the dlang organization on github,
what do you want to fly across the world to see them for anyway?
https://github.com/search?utf8=✓&q=user%3Adlang+author%3Alightbender&type=Issues
I see six merged pulls, none in the last four years, most of them
trivial C declarations.
Your balkanization/tribalism claims are really ridiculous,
suggesting you don't even know what those words mean. Tribalism
refers to trying to keep everybody in your tribe together,
usually by attacking a common enemy, yet you simultaneously
accuse me of balkanization, ie splitting up the community by
decentralizing DConf. So which is it: am I trying to keep the
tribe together or split it up? Don't answer that, I know whatever
you say won't make any sense either.
The truth is that you're the one here suffering from tribalism,
because you'd rather keep the traditional DConf-going tribe
together than open the community up with many more DConf
locations. That only causes "balkanization" if you're forced to
go to the local DConf, but since you have the interest and can
afford to fly to any far-away location anyway, clearly that's not
a problem for you.
The purpose of DConf is that it is specifically open to any
person from anywhere in the world who wishs to attend. It is a
global meeting point for everyone. What you keep propounding is
a Meetup. We have those. They have not yet been able to replace
DConf in terms of cost-benefit effectiveness as judged by the
attendance of DConf. Balkanizing the community will no more
produce forward motion than a single conference limited to just
the "core" people.
What is the use of having a single "global meeting point" that
99.5+% of the community doesn't attend? Yes, a decentralized
DConf has some similarities to meetups, but it's not the same.
For one, these would be all-day events, not one-off talks like
meetups.
I have no idea how you determine the "cost-benefit effectiveness"
of meetups versus DConf, considering an order of magnitude or two
more people attend the meetups than DConf. Andrei's talk in
Munich last year alone had more people attending than DConf:
https://www.meetup.com/Munich-D-Programmers/events/243402617/
Yes, it is expensive, but in all the years I've attended, I
have not once regretted spending the money. And indeed,
coming from the west coast of the US, I have one of the more
expensive (and physically taxing) trips to make. I know a
number of people who found jobs in D through DConf, would
that not make the conference worth it to them?
How many people got jobs versus how many attended? Would that
money to get 100 people in the same room seven times have been
much better spent on other things? Run the cost-benefit
analysis and I think it's obvious my two suggestions come out
better. At best, you can maybe say that wasn't the case at the
first DConf in 2007, when high-speed internet wasn't as
pervasive and Youtube was only two years old, but not for
every DConf since.
To the one person who did, the collective cost is irrelevant.
To them it was literally a life-changing event. Is their
experience somehow less relevant, important, or meaningful?
You don't make organizational plans for the D community based on
emotional pleas about a single "life-changing event," especially
since no reason has been given why that event wouldn't happen
anyway if the DConf format changed.
Rather, the goal should be to enable the growth of the D
community as a whole, not finding a few people within the
community jobs that supposedly "change their life."
Something is only expensive if you derive less value from it
than it costs. And for many people here, I understand if the
cost-benefit analysis does not favor DConf. But calling for
an end to DConf simply because it doesn't meet someones
cost-benefit ratio is inconsiderate to the rest of us who do
find the benefit.
I don't care about your personal cost-benefit ratio. I care
about the cost-benefit analysis to the language and ecosystem
as a whole.
What, pray tell, is so cost ineffective about the conference if
enough people choose to attend every year that it does not
loose money?
Just because DConf currently covers its costs has essentially no
bearing on whether it is the best possible use of that money.
Apple could have just kept coming out with new iPods for years
and been very profitable, rather than coming out with a different
product like the iPhone in 2007. But the fact that they made that
leap into the smartphone market is what makes them the largest
and most profitable company in the world today, even though they
knew and discussed the fact that it would cannibalize their
existing iPod business.
Similarly, the D leadership's goal shouldn't be to maintain a
profitable but antiquated DConf format, but to grow the community
much more.
Nobody is making you go, and, since you already get
everything you want from the YouTube video uploads during the
conference, why do you care if the rest of us "waste" our
money on attending the conference? That is our choice. Not
yours.
Try reading the older forum thread I originally linked,
Jonathan and I have already been over all this. D is a
collective effort, and it's a colossal waste of the
community's efforts to spend all that time and money on the
dying conference format that DConf has been using.
It signals to me and many others that D is not a serious
effort to get used as a language, but simply a bunch of
hobbyists who want to have "fun" meeting up at an exotic
locale once a year, in between hacking on an experimental
language that they're fine if nobody else uses.
It may signal that to you, but I have seen no evidence that it
signals it to others.
Until recently, nobody strongly made this case for changing the
format. But now that I have and the market shows that format
declining, I think that will be the signal sent by keeping the
status quo.
And I'd hardly call Berlin or Munich "exotic". Now if we could
get something going in Mallorca, or Sardinia, or Bali... Beam
me up Scotty!
For most engineers not living in Germany or Palo Alto, those
locales are exotic enough. That there are bigger party locations
is neither here nor there.
If that's D's focus, fine, just own it. Put it on the front
page: "This is a hobbyist language, please don't bother using
it in production. We are much more focused on where we can
vacation together next year than trying to spread awareness
and improve the language."
Regardless of whether you post that notice or not, that is
what continuing the current DConf format advertises, given
that others have already been moving away from it.
Note: Limiting anything to "core" members is a guaranteed way
to create a mono-culture and would inevitably lead to the
stagnation of D.
Good, then you agree with me that we should avoid such
stagnation by broadening DConf to be a bunch of meetups in
many more cities?
Which is why anybody can post to all NG's, even the internals
NG.
This is not actually true. There are two newsgroups that seem
to have that designation, which show up separately as
`internals` and `dmd` at forum.dlang.org, and the latter
doesn't allow me to post to it without registering somewhere,
unlike the rest of the web forums.
Guess what the current DConf format does to most people who
don't attend too...
I'm done responding to these irrational responses that ignore
everything I wrote. I'll just link them to this long debunking
from now on.
In all of your response I get the sense that there is a deeply
personal motivation behind your crusade. Yet you dance around
that motivation carefully
That's funny, because that's precisely the sense I get from you,
given your wildly incoherent responses so far that cannot even
get the facts straight, like how many conferences were shown to
be closing.
There is nothing "deeply personal," nor is it a "crusade." I
don't know how I can dance around a motivation that until now
nobody other than you has even mentioned.
you routinely dismiss other peoples experiences as invalid
either simply because you disagree,
Please point to a single instance where I dismissed someone's
"experiences," you will find none in this entire thread. Nobody
has even talked about their experiences, and I'm not sure how you
even "disagree" with an experience. One can disagree with the
conclusions they draw from that experience, but not the
experience itself.
or some other conference did something different
I have literally not presented _any_ other conference as
precedent. I think this may now pass more than a dozen times you
simply make up stuff you think I said. That's a stunning record
for just two posts.
and you set up strawmen to attack
Please point to a single strawman I created. I have pointed out
more than a dozen you made up.
rather than directly answering questions.
Heh, I have obsessively answered all your questions, while you
just ignore mine.
Please. For the benefit of all of us. Explain your motivation.
It is very simple. Unlike you, I'm presenting ideas to advance
the D language and community. I'm not making arguments from the
point of "I'd like to have fun in Berlin for 3-4 days and then
ignore D again for the next four years."
The level of emotion you are bringing to this debate cannot be
rationally explained on the merits of your argument alone.
There is no emotion in the vast majority of what I wrote, merely
dispassionate arguments. I have gotten somewhat frustrated with
how you repeatedly make up stuff and attribute it to me or
strangely talk about how we're "social animals" when I was
pushing for more in-person interaction in the first place, but
the only time I got angry was when you mirrored Jonathan's
argument from the previous thread, basically saying, "We enjoy
flying across the world for the current DConf format, why should
we listen to anything you say?" I then pointed out that exhibited
a very narrow mindset, ie that your personal enjoyment was more
important than what actually advanced the D ecosystem.
Anyway, it's clear that you're incapable of contributing to a
debate on the DConf format, considering all the factual errors
you've made so far and that you finally stooped to the level of
questioning my motivations, so I'll stop responding to you now.