On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:27:34 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:03:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>
>> That's irrelevant.  Some of the people who left recently were *very* active contributors, who have had a lot of work merged and who did a lot of user support on their own free time.  We're not talking here about the regular whiners who show up out of nowhere with strange or unreasonable demands while not lifting a finger themselves. (Personally I just hit the delete button for those, it's not worth my time.)  We're talking about people who have had a long history of contributing to D getting frustrated with the way they were treated *in spite of having actively contributed* to D.
>>
>
> Please would you elaborate on what you mean by how they were treated?
>
> Admittedly I am not active here so I may be missing things, but I don't see anyone being mistreated here by Walter.
>
> If you mean that contributions are not being looked at - I think it goes back to the fact this is volunteer project and everyone works on what they want to work on. In this setup to get someone else to take an interest in your contribution is hard! That's how it is.
>
> The fact that someone looks at your contribution seriously at all is itself a miracle.
>
> I don't see a solution - unless you want to fund D so that a large team can be hired!

And even that is not guaranteed to work. The kinds of conflicts we are observing here occur in businesses where everyone is a paid employee. People get upset about how they are being treated, or perceive how they are being treated, and they leave.

In addition to the real problems cited by you and others, I think there is also a generational factor. Walter is an older person; I can say that because I'm even further to the right on that axis, plus he's a classic engineer (that's a compliment). The more experience you have, the more you know about what can go wrong, so the tendency is to slow down, make sure things are thought through.

The bright young folks are full of energy and ideas and they like to move fast.

Combine these two characteristics well and you've really got something. This is much like Modern Portfolio Theory, where you can build a portfolio from multiple risky securities that is much less risky than any of them, due to how covariance is computed. It's also a "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" phenomenon.

It's clear that this project has not done a good enough job of combining the generations to get the best from both. There are issues, shortcomings, on both sides that I don't need to repeat -- they've been discussed here ad nauseam. It's vitally important that everyone left on the main D project try to learn from this latest blowup to avoid a repeat performance. No childish name-calling, proper attention paid to the work of people trying to contribute (which does not mean accepting their work just because they are well intentioned), etc. This is a necessary condition for this project to achieve more success than it has, however you define "success".

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:03:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> button for those, it's not worth my time.)  We're talking about people who have had a long history of contributing to D getting frustrated with the way they were treated *in spite of having actively contributed* to D.

I'm going to leave a few paragraphs here about this and then I'll say nothing more about it. And I want to be clear that these are my personal thoughts, not any sort of "official" thing on behalf of anyone in the DLF.

Whatever went on in the past, we have been actively working to make things better. When Grim posted his rant about deprecations, we implemented a new deprecation policy and actually started reverting deprecations. And though I know he has accused us of making no progress on the gripes and wishes, we actually have done so. That it hasn't been publicized is on me. Updating the list with the status of the points we've addressed is on my TODO list, but it's been a low priority for me.

After Adam made it known to me in an email last year how he really felt, I put him at the top of my list when I started reaching out to long-time contributors for one-on-one chats. We brought him into the meetings and he got Walter to accept the @standalone feature early on. When he brought in 1036e, Walter agreed to give it a fair evaluation. Adam was unhappy that Walter wanted a spec, so Atila agreed to put the editions proposal on hold to get it done (and please, let's not rehash the argument about reading code vs. writing specs).

All of this despite new features being on hold while we are focused on stabilization *and* editions being a very high priority. And despite the verbal abuse that Adam heaped on us in our meetings and repeatedly in the Discord server.

So please excuse me for being blunt when I say it's getting really tiresome hearing that we treated Adam badly here. Again, whatever happened in the past, that was not what was happening in this situation. He was at the table, actively being listened to, and actively providing feedback in our meetings.

I was extremely disappointed when he decided to follow the path he chose. I had high hopes that we were at the beginning of a new stage in our relationship with him. I like Adam, I admire the volume of code he has produced over the years, and I appreciate the untold lines of text he's written and hours he's spent helping new D programmers find their way.

I just wanted to leave this here as my personal perspective on what's happened the past few weeks. I have no interest in debating anyone about this and I'm not going to engage with any rebuttals.

We have work to do, and this topic has been beaten to death ten times over by now. Contributors have felt disrespected and ignored. We hear you. We all recognize and accept that we need to take steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again in the future and provide the means to resolve it if it does. Reiterating and rehashing the accusations again and again is just going to keep these threads mired in multiple pages of points and counterpoints while adding no value to the conversation, doing nothing to help move us forward, and just filling the place with negative vibes.

Contributor relations need to improve. We get it. So I implore everyone to please lay this to rest and let's get on with the business of making things better for all of us.

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 04:31:11PM +0000, Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:03:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> > button for those, it's not worth my time.)  We're talking about people who have had a long history of contributing to D getting frustrated with the way they were treated *in spite of having actively contributed* to D.
[...]
> So please excuse me for being blunt when I say it's getting really tiresome hearing that we treated Adam badly here.
[...]

I wasn't referring only to Adam. There's also been a long line of others, like Wilzbach, berni44, Mihails Strasuns, bearophile, etc..  If it were only Adam, I'd have written it off as something specific to him, or other incidental factors. But when we have a long line of previously active, productive contributors walk away, we have a problem.

We should be growing the number of contributors, like with Linux kernel developers, not bleeding them.


T

-- 
Why do conspiracy theories always come from the same people??

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 17:38:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> But when we have a long line of previously active, productive contributors walk away, we have a problem.
>
> We should be growing the number of contributors, like with Linux kernel developers, not bleeding them.
>

I feel that with any project, there will never be the same set of contributors over a longish period of time. This is true even in commercial organizations, where people come and go. In fact the health of the eco system is actually that no one is indispensable. Organizations will often fire talented people who are disruptive.

I feel D has been remarkably successful in attracting contributors.

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 17:38:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> ...
> I wasn't referring only to Adam. There's also been a long line of others, like Wilzbach, berni44, Mihails Strasuns, bearophile, etc..  If it were only Adam, I'd have written it ...

Jonathan Marler which by the way was trying to implement a String interpolation with tuples, and I think that was the last straw.

Matheus.

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 03:27:34PM +0000, Dibyendu Majumdar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 15:03:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > That's irrelevant.  Some of the people who left recently were *very* active contributors, who have had a lot of work merged and who did a lot of user support on their own free time.  We're not talking here about the regular whiners who show up out of nowhere with strange or unreasonable demands while not lifting a finger themselves. (Personally I just hit the delete button for those, it's not worth my time.)  We're talking about people who have had a long history of contributing to D getting frustrated with the way they were treated *in spite of having actively contributed* to D.
> > 
> 
> Please would you elaborate on what you mean by how they were treated?

I've already said this before elsewhere, but in short: an eager contributor shows up, submits PRs which are merged, then is given commit access to Phobos. He and I worked together to clear up Phobos' backed-up PR queue.  Then suddenly out of the blue, Andrei shows up after months of being MIA (or just giving 1-word responses) and drops on us like a ton of bricks, saying that we did this and that wrong, we let things through that shouldn't have been let through, Good Work vs. Great Work, etc..  A bunch of PRs were reverted.

Now, perhaps Andrei was right, and what we did wasn't up to the D leadership's standard.  But here's the point: we were never informed about this beforehand.  We were not told what exactly was expected of us.  There were no guidelines, no list of things to watch out for, no overall direction that would guide our decisions, nothing.  Just unwritten rules that we were expected to know, perhaps by clairvoyance, lest the fury descend upon us from on high.

In the aftermath, said contributor walked away. Who could blame him?  I stayed, but greatly scaled back my own contributions.  Not because I was upset (I wasn't), but I thought, since my work wasn't good enough, I should just let somebody else more qualified to step up.  Guess what? Nobody did.  In the end, the DLF had to pay someone to work on the PR queues.  I guess that's about the only way anyone would be willing to work under such circumstances.

This isn't the only time something like this happened, it's just the one I know better because I was personally involved. The same pattern has been repeated throughout the time I was with D.  Clearly, something isn't going right here.


[...]
> I don't see a solution - unless you want to fund D so that a large team can be hired!

This is perhaps the crux of it.  We're trying to run an open source, volunteer-driven project -- and a *small* one at that -- like a large, proprietary enterprise, and it's not working very well.  Andrei's reaction above?  Not entirely unexpected in a large corporation.  You're being paid to do the work, so you just swallow it and do your job.  But in a volunteer-driven open-source project?  Well, we're seeing the consequences unfolding right before our eyes.


T

-- 
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. -- Abraham Lincoln

On Thu, Jan 18, 2024 at 05:49:22PM +0000, Dibyendu Majumdar via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 17:38:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > But when we have a long line of previously active, productive contributors walk away, we have a problem.
> > 
> > We should be growing the number of contributors, like with Linux kernel developers, not bleeding them.
> > 
> 
> I feel that with any project, there will never be the same set of contributors over a longish period of time. This is true even in commercial organizations, where people come and go. In fact the health of the eco system is actually that no one is indispensable. Organizations will often fire talented people who are disruptive.

The way D is being run, it *should* have been a commercial organization where the leadership is free to impose whatever arbitrary standards they want to, and the employees either suck it up or get fired. It'd have been more successful that way.

Unfortunately, this style of management isn't working very well in a volunteer-driven open source project. Our history proves this.


> I feel D has been remarkably successful in attracting contributors.

Because D, the language, is just *that* good.  It's very close to my ideal of what a programming language ought to be.  Which is why I'm still here.  I want to see D succeed.  If D were any less, I'd have walked away too.  I could be doing a lot of other things with my free time.


T

-- 
Klein bottle for rent ... inquire within. -- Stephen Mulraney

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 14:02:56 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 13:04:09 UTC, claptrap wrote:
>> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 11:37:51 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 11:07:36 UTC, DrDread wrote:
>>>>
>>> In a project like this, everything happens because someone likes what you did, and wants to help, there is no obligation for anyone to engage with anyone.
>>
>> I have no obligation to be nice to my freinds.
>>
>> But if I'm not I will quickly end up with none.
>>
>> See how that works?
>
> It only proves my point, because the only people not nice on these forums are these so called contributors, many of who actually have made no contribution but are happy to make a lot of demands as if its their right!

LOL you aint proved nothing. You cant because you dont know who anyone is. You dont know who I am or what I contribute. You are just making assumptions and unfounded accusations because you cant argue with what I actually said.

You say nobody has any obligation to engage with anyone. You are 100% right, it is so right it is pointless to say. But if you want people to help, you want to build a community, draw people to your cause then you absolutely have to engage with them. To expect one without the other would be utter stupidity.

On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 17:49:22 UTC, Dibyendu Majumdar wrote:
> On Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 17:38:44 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> But when we have a long line of previously active, productive contributors walk away, we have a problem.
>>
>> We should be growing the number of contributors, like with Linux kernel developers, not bleeding them.
>>
>
> I feel that with any project, there will never be the same set of contributors over a longish period of time. This is true even in commercial organizations, where people come and go. In fact the health of the eco system is actually that no one is indispensable. Organizations will often fire talented people who are disruptive.
>
> I feel D has been remarkably successful in attracting contributors.

Naa,man, I doubt you have any idea the background story of this whole conversation. I get that you're pumped up about D, but you're missing a lot of context.

Maybe let those who have context of the history hash it out themselves. You've already stated you're not active in here.

Mike admits they're working on improving things. I've been on and off here since 2014 and I've seen quite a bit. I'm kinda sad a number of the people who left were once super active in the community. I hope we find a way to improve the experience of contributors. Imagine where the community would be if we had all those guys still actively participating in the community.

As much as it might frustrate some folks here, every leader gotta deal with complaints...and will need to listen, communicate, admit (when necessary), and assure memebers of the willingness to improve. That alone something. We're not robots, we're humans, so the social side of managing a community matters. I however would urge doing that without throwing insults or being harsh.

Big shout out to Mike for the always calming things down in this regard.