First and foremost, thank you all for the quick responses, I respect the
awareness and willingness to engage and you have been sharing plenty of
information that gives some clues to an outsider.
Dear OC,
I'm not suggesting the enforcement of a real-time platform, I just miss
having the option, and it really seems to stand out even among niche
languages. (Just like the bureaucracy around tickets stands out from
usual FOSS projects. Discussions in Github issues are often super
valuable, unless the maintainers have the Gulp mindset.)
I would say each to their own. A mailing list doesn't even really have a
GUI and for what it's worth, it took me at least a week to get myself to
formulate a possibly unpleasant message like this. The entry point
really is high. I don't think all those indie communities, from Prolog
and Raku to Factor and Uiua, from PHP to Pascal (to name some slowly
shrinking old giants as well) make a mistake by offering some real-time,
lower-barrier means to get involved.
I have admittedly had a lot of conflicts in my activity in FOSS (or just
volunteering) communities - perhaps not unrelated to the fact that I go
ahead and ask the problematic questions - but I don't think it has ever
been a problem that I didn't take the expectable effort to learn or
solve something. I'm among the people who ask "micro questions" while
trying to learn something better - "why does this happen", "is there a
better way to solve this", "how does this compare to X in given other
language", "where can I learn more about this specific thing" and so on.
For me this overhead of having to use a forum - a rather inconvenient
one at that, if I may - is rather discouraging in itself. I don't feel
this is a very organic way of learning - let alone getting a more
"native" feel of how the language is being used, developed, and so on.
... and then I realize I'm writing a massive wall of text that couldn't
really elaborate or highlight the points or questions I had and wasted
both my and the potential readers'/answerers' time, just like now.
I don't know if there is any conclusion we could draw.
Have a nice day.
Martin
