On Thursday, July 13, 2006, at 05:32 pm, Paolo Amoroso wrote: > "Brad Beveridge" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> Thanks for your time and effort being a Green Thumb. I hope that >> you'll stay on the Gardeners mailing list. > > Sure. > > >> Our mailing list is very quiet of late, would anybody care to comment >> as to why that could be? Is there enough motivation left amongst us >> to try and make our community more active again? > > Maybe there is motivation, but it mostly comes from "scratch an > itch"-kind of projects, not generic, well intentioned suggestions on > how things might be improved, in which there is no personal > involvement and specific interest. I think that those who did > something over the past few months would have done it anyway, because > it was something they felt they needed or liked. > > But I don't know whether motivation is enough to explain the quietness > of this list and related projects. >
I've been thinking about this too, on and off, over the last few days and weeks. What is it about Lisp that makes it difficult to build the kind of community that (say) Ruby has, or that Linux has? In the end I turned this question on its head and asked myself "what is it about [Ruby, Linux] that makes it easier to build communities?". Here are my thoughts (most of which are seriously half-baked, and likely wrong, but what the hell): <sweeping generalisation mode> 1. Most communities are actually pretty small; the Ruby community seems to be mainly cheerleaders, I'm not convinced there's many people actively working on libraries and such. They've had a *couple* of people work on *a* library/framework that was useful (rails), but realistically how many people are gardening that now? I'd guess: not very many (perhaps no more than the original developers). I suspect since Lispniks are more sophisticated (!) we may have fewer cheerleaders. 2. Most Lisp stuff is already managed; if you want to work to improve McCLIM or some other (active) project there's a good chance that a mailing list exists for it elsewhere so we don't see that traffic here -- this gives perhaps more of an impression of apathy than is fair. Many Lisp tools (either the compilers themselves, such as SBCL or OpenMCL, or a sizable library) have an active group or individual maintaining them who are too responsive to bug reports etc. (i.e. once a bug is noticed and reported there's a reasonable chance the maintainers will have it fixed PDQ). 3. The Linux community to me seems more centered around distributions than any specific tool or library (for specific tool or library support, it falls back to (2)) -- much of the community seems to me to center around improving 'a distribution' which might involve changes or documentation for more specific elements, but it is a reasonably large number of people working with a large body of code. 4. Perhaps these communities don't actually exist any more than the Lisp community exists; 'the community' consists of a number of bloggers, a collection of mailing lists for specific bits of code (kernel mailing list, Gnome mailing list etc. etc.), and a relatively small number of people involved in active code maintenance in each of those code areas (i.e. exactly the same as the 'Lisp community' only scaled up since more people are using Linux than Lisp). </sweeping generalisation mode> I still think the idea of gardening is a good one; I suspect we (as 'a community') just haven't yet found anything large enough to coalesce around that has enough scope so that everybody can help out at their respective ability level and feel that their input is useful. I get the impression that much of Lisp (at least the Free bits) is at the stage Linux was at 15 (ish) years ago; download the kernel, download the tools individually, jump through hoops building stuff, and with sufficient perseverance you end up with a useful (although likely bespoke) system you can play with (I enjoyed Linux at this stage :-). The proprietary Lisps seem to me to be more like distributions; they have GUIs and assorted tools / libraries, all packaged together (and documented consistently) and working out of the box. Perhaps we need more 'distributions' but it seems to me Lisp people maybe like building from source and fitting the pieces together for themselves... Maybe the time is not quite here for the Gardeners to take off; I'm sure the time is coming if not. I think that's enough rambling from me for now ;-) -Duncan > > Paolo > -- > Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log - http://www.paoloamoroso.it/log > _______________________________________________ > Gardeners mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners > _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
