Maintainers needed

[Faré]

On Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 6:17 AM, Alexandre Rademaker <arademaker at gmail.com>
wrote:
> It would be interesting to see a serious study about how such coordination
> happens in other ecosystems.
>
I just saw a tweet by someone thanking the PHP community for how it welcome
him to programming, etc., promptly followed by many metoo's. PHP the
language may suck, badly, but apparently, the community has something to
teach us.

I believe an important feature for a language is low overhead to starting
to program. Between files, packages, modules and systems, classes and
structures, portability issues, etc., CL requires a lot of overhead just to
get into it. This creates a barrier to entry. Attempts to simplify like
quick-build or asdf-inferred-system only help so much when a lot of
complexity is inherent to the copious standard or lack thereof (depending
on the topic). Quicklisp tremendously lowered the barrier to reusing other
people's code, but didn't by itself change the culture, document the code,
or consolidate divergent efforts. Lispers remain by and large
individualists who don't program in large herds and don't know how to.

> In some cases, it looks like the environment
> impose the coordination somehow (ex: R). In cases like Python, despite the
> messy proliferation of libraries with redundant functionalities, people
seen
> to be happy (or ignorant about the problems). Haskell is trying to address
> version dependencies, but it looks still complicated to understand the
> options available. Anyway, for me, it is a social issue more than a
> technical one.
>
Social and technical are very much linked. See for instance the essay that
got me started with ASDF: https://fare.livejournal.com/149264.html — by
implementing the technical feature that ASDF could upgrade itself, the
social incentives switched for all players from "upgrading ASDF is socially
toxic" to "not upgrading ASDF is socially slightly detrimental".

Some of the overhead of CL is builtin the language and its ecosystem and
too costly to remove (see above). Some of the barriers to entry can be
adressed: writing tutorials, curating and documenting libraries, providing
easily documented and easily found solutions to common problems, and
cheaper bridges to other ecosystems, etc.

It's a lot of work, but it's also about having a technical kernel suitable
to foster cooperation.

> But from time to time we see a significant transformation, I believe we
all
> agree about the huge impact of Quicklisp!
>
Yes, Xach single-handedly solved a great number of problems for all CL
hackers, where many others tried and failed after burning out. He deserves
a lot of praises.

-#f
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