Hi,
Your email is not an assault I think, but nevertheless I would like to add some
positive remarks on the community.
It is true that us...@racket-lang.org has changed in the last year or two
years, I think.
There are much less posts of users nowadays.
It is obvious that what you call the ‘cabal’ has much influence, more than
users.
Of course they have.
But my experience is that the ‘cabal’ take questions and suggestions of users
seriously.
Questions and problem reports of users always are responded to very promptly.
Well, that’s my experience.
And with respect to the future of Racket:
I think users have enough opportunity to contribute their opinions.
That’s how I feel about it, just my few cents.
Best wishes, Jos
From: Neil Van Dyke
Sent: 24 June 2020 07:59
To: racket-mo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [racket-money] Fwd: [racket-dev] Racket Survey 2020
There's a Racket community, but Racket isn't a community project, and I
think that's not the fault of the community members.
Racket is directed by the interests of a cabal (or clique, or monarchy)
of professors. I think most of their intentions are admirable (and,
really, most of them still chose to become professors when it was clear
they could make a lot more money going to Google, when Google was cooler).
When it was mostly just Matthias and his students, Matthias seemed to
include and respect non-professor community members more, and I recall
collaborations in the early community that were not only among the
professors. But a cabal kinda solidified around the time Matthias's
students were becoming professors. The effect was kinda a bait and
switch, though I don't think that was intended. Then various other
things happened.
Today, one perspective is that it's more like there's a cabal, the cabal
controls a platform, and there is user base to
support/engage/retain/grow/leverage.
There are practical reasons for controlling it (e.g., some development
needs money to fund it, justified as research, and they also still want
to push it in directions to suit their research and careers), but then
it's not a community project.
I suspect they wonder why they're making additional effort, beyond their
research papers and education projects, to have a community (e.g., spend
time on community email lists, ask how Rust keeps its users happy,
entertain a survey), and to do some things that they think their users
want, when the users aren't giving back much work, and it's still not
popular. So the monarchy is maybe frustrated and resentful about all
the peasants freeloading on their benevolence, and the monarchy doesn't
know how to community those worthless ingrates harder.
The community actually used to have prolific contributors, and those
contributors did much to bootstrap and build the community and relative
popularity of PLT, at a time when Matthias's students might've been
pretty distracted with their dissertations and interviewing, but most of
those people eventually left, and were forgotten.
Looks like there are currently some prolific contributors, but looks
like even they aren't treated as peers by the cabal, in things
professors think are important.
I think there's a Racket community, but that it exists despite the fact
that Racket isn't a community project.
(It's funny to distinguish community from user base, in a forum about
making money in contemporary dotcom world. :)
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