[pro] Learning Lisp the Bump Free Way

[karol skocik]

I would like to add, that in our community seems to be a very low
collaboration factor between random developers working on OSS
software, in comparison to other communities.
One would say, sure there are a lot of distinct interests, but this
happens even on common interests (decent utilities library for
example). So many half-baked efforts exists in utilities space, that
no one tries to merge together.
One would say - alexandria is the answer.
Some time ago, I tried to communicate on IRC channel about a very,
very simple addition:
string+, which is obviously a nice, small name for (apply
#'concatenate 'string strings).
I use it all the time in my projects, and basically copy such
trivialities all the time since I don't want to create yet another
my-half-baked-utils repository.
What happened on the channel had roughly this character:
- one person trying to persuade me, that writing (concatenate 'string
"a" "b") instead of (string+ "a" "b") is the way to go, even when I
explained it's verbose, and annoying when you do it a lot
- another arguing that HE don't have such needs (concatenating
strings), so he was negative (in a different way) about the addition
of this extremely simple, yet very convenient thing
- another was mildly ok about it, would't mind about it

The result, nothing was added. Recently, on alexandria mailing list,
the exactly same request arose. The result is the same. Some
developers clearly want to put themselves in the shoes on guarding
angels, and are intolerant to other people needs. CL has hundreds of
things, maybe I used 1/3 of them. Even in alexandria there is a lot of
stuff (at least 1/2 I didn't used yet, and probably never will. What's
the problem then?

Net result is - no collaboration in Lisp space. In Erlang community, I
fixed and extended about a dozen things, people care and are thankful.
In Lisp, I always have to argue with somebody.

Karol

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 9:49 PM, David Owen <dsowen at fugue88.ws> wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jan 2011, Pascal Costanza wrote:
>
>> One of the things you can also notice in the communities of more
>> popular languages is that people get a lot more positive feedback,
>> including for a lot more trivial contributions. I believe that this
>> is one of the reasons (not the only one) why those other languages
>> are popular in some cases.
>
> This is an excllent observation!  I've just added a task to my list to
> identify and express gratitude for the libraries, &c that I use.
>
> And, thanks to all on this list for good discussion!
>
> Sincerely,
> David
>
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