On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 18:43:42 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> When someone submits a contribution, and you make them wait for weeks or months before you even acknowledge their work, the message you are sending is that their work is not important and their time is not valuable.
>
> When someone shares their ideas, and you dismiss them without even attempting to reach a common understanding, the message you are sending is that their ideas are not worth listening to.
>
> When you require others to follow rules and processes, but exempt yourself from them, the message you are sending is that you do not view those people as your equals.
>
> No matter how polite you are, if you treat people like their work is not important, their time is not valuable, their ideas are not worth listening to, and they are not your equals, then you are not treating them with respect.

Hmm, my reactions are:

* You have to live in the real world. Even in paid work, your PR can languish for ages, and sometimes never get merged.
* It is not because people don't respect you - the more mundane reason is they haven't got the bandwidth, and you didn't make it easy.
* I dread looking at complex PRs myself.
* If I want my changes to go through it is up to me to make it as easy to consume as possible. This means I may need to break it up into palatable steps, document thoroughly, do in-person or zoom walk through of the changes; understand concerns, and address them.

This is how things work everywhere.

Secondly - of course you are not equal. The language has designated leads, you are not and cannot be equal to them; they have a final say.

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 20:26:50 UTC, Meta wrote:
> There's plenty of blame to go around, and ultimately it just comes down to a clash of different personalities and outlooks. People have wildly different motivations, and different standards for what constitutes disrespect, and ways of dealing with it. Not to mention varying levels of maturity and social skills.
>
> Sometimes shit just happens and there's not much you can do to avoid or fix it.

Yes, that's certainly true.

My intent is not to focus on Adam Ruppe's case specifically, but on the broader pattern that also includes former contributors like Sebastian Wilzbach, Jonathan Marler, ag0aep6g, Suleyman Sahmi (SSoulaimane), etc. When one relationship fails, that's unfortunate. When a long string of relationships fail in the same way, that's a sign of a deeper problem.

Even if we grant that there was nothing more to be done in Adam's case, I think D's approach to contributor relationships is leaving a lot of value on the table.

On 1/18/2024 3:14 AM, DrDread wrote:
> and this is also a problem. you leave bad features in the language that turned out to not work proberly, instead of just deprecating them.
> people don't mind breaking code as much as you think, as long as it doesn't silently break.
We recently has a long, acrimonious thread with people complaining that D would break their existing code, and not silently.

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 22:36:39 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 1/18/2024 3:14 AM, DrDread wrote:
>> and this is also a problem. you leave bad features in the language that turned out to not work proberly, instead of just deprecating them.
>> people don't mind breaking code as much as you think, as long as it doesn't silently break.
> We recently has a long, acrimonious thread with people complaining that D would break their existing code, and not silently.

My understanding is that you now have a plan in place to change the language without breaking old code. Hopefully it works, because it will be one of the most important changes in the time I've used D.

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 08:51:48PM +0000, Paul Backus via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 20:26:50 UTC, Meta wrote:
[...]
> My intent is not to focus on Adam Ruppe's case specifically, but on the broader pattern that also includes former contributors like Sebastian Wilzbach, Jonathan Marler, ag0aep6g, Suleyman Sahmi (SSoulaimane), etc. When one relationship fails, that's unfortunate. When a long string of relationships fail in the same way, that's a sign of a deeper problem.

Exactly.


> Even if we grant that there was nothing more to be done in Adam's case, I think D's approach to contributor relationships is leaving a lot of value on the table.

Yes, this area definitely needs improving.  We should be keeping active contributors, not losing them.


T

-- 
Let's not fight disease by killing the patient. -- Sean 'Shaleh' Perry

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 06:31:33 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 18/01/2024 3:51 PM, Mike Parker wrote:
>> And while we're at it, can we please get rid of this "us vs. them" mentality? We are all here for the same overarching reason: we're enthusiastic about the D programming language. We all want it to succeed, and we all want it to help us achieve our ideas and our goals. It doesn't matter if you're on the DLF team, an employee at one of the D shops, self-employed, or doing this just for fun. So let's please keep that in mind when we're interacting with each other.
>
> Part of the problem that allows this to exist is simply because Walter & Atila are not where the people are.
>
> Yes Walter is active on the N.G., Atila isn't.
>
> However neither are on Discord, the easiest of live chat methods that we have.
Discord is a huge time sink and unproductive. I doubt the DLF folks can deal with it and get anything done. I sometimes wonder how you guys manage to get anything else done lol.

On a serious note, I think being active in this forum alone is enough. But no pressure.

On 1/18/2024 10:43 AM, Paul Backus wrote:
> When someone submits a contribution, and you make them wait for weeks or months before you even acknowledge their work, the message you are sending is that their work is not important and their time is not valuable.

Since these three examples have come up repeatedly, I will add some context.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15715

That was submitted Oct 20. Discussion about it had gone on in the n.g. for years, which I participated in heavily.

> When someone shares their ideas, and you dismiss them without even attempting to reach a common understanding, the message you are sending is that their ideas are not worth listening to.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12828

Heated discussion has gone on about that issue for years, including at DConf.
Also, https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12828#issuecomment-875455810


> When you require others to follow rules and processes, but exempt yourself from them, the message you are sending is that you do not view those people as your equals.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12507

ImportC is not a language change, and so did not require a DIP. It was not pulled by myself, either. You could think of it as simply integration of existing tools we were already using. The 3 tools that convert C code to D code,  htod, DStep, and dpp, showed the need for it. It had no impact on anyone who wasn't interested in it. We also do not require DIPs for bug fixes, internal improvements to the compiler, better code generation, adding things like generating C++ headers from D code, etc.

And sure, ImportC met with a lot of skepticism (Adam called it "completely useless" https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12507#issuecomment-835915214). Over time, it has found its legs and audience. A good proxy for how useful a feature is is the quantity of bugzilla issues submitted, and ImportC has had a lot of them! (317 submitted, 274 resolved)


> No matter how polite you are, if you treat people like their work is not important, their time is not valuable, their ideas are not worth listening to, and they are not your equals, then you are not treating them with respect.

I agree completely. I also agree that there are instances where I do not live up to those ideals, and need to do better. A better example would be when I added user defined attributes over 10 years ago (the result of which the DIP process was initiated).