Hi, Your email is not an assault I think, but nevertheless I would like to add some positive remarks on the community.
It is true that us...@racket-lang.org has changed in the last year or two years, I think. There are much less posts of users nowadays. It is obvious that what you call the ‘cabal’ has much influence, more than users. Of course they have. But my experience is that the ‘cabal’ take questions and suggestions of users seriously. Questions and problem reports of users always are responded to very promptly. Well, that’s my experience. And with respect to the future of Racket: I think users have enough opportunity to contribute their opinions. That’s how I feel about it, just my few cents. Best wishes, Jos From: Neil Van Dyke Sent: 24 June 2020 07:59 To: racket-mo...@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: [racket-money] Fwd: [racket-dev] Racket Survey 2020 There's a Racket community, but Racket isn't a community project, and I think that's not the fault of the community members. Racket is directed by the interests of a cabal (or clique, or monarchy) of professors. I think most of their intentions are admirable (and, really, most of them still chose to become professors when it was clear they could make a lot more money going to Google, when Google was cooler). When it was mostly just Matthias and his students, Matthias seemed to include and respect non-professor community members more, and I recall collaborations in the early community that were not only among the professors. But a cabal kinda solidified around the time Matthias's students were becoming professors. The effect was kinda a bait and switch, though I don't think that was intended. Then various other things happened. Today, one perspective is that it's more like there's a cabal, the cabal controls a platform, and there is user base to support/engage/retain/grow/leverage. There are practical reasons for controlling it (e.g., some development needs money to fund it, justified as research, and they also still want to push it in directions to suit their research and careers), but then it's not a community project. I suspect they wonder why they're making additional effort, beyond their research papers and education projects, to have a community (e.g., spend time on community email lists, ask how Rust keeps its users happy, entertain a survey), and to do some things that they think their users want, when the users aren't giving back much work, and it's still not popular. So the monarchy is maybe frustrated and resentful about all the peasants freeloading on their benevolence, and the monarchy doesn't know how to community those worthless ingrates harder. The community actually used to have prolific contributors, and those contributors did much to bootstrap and build the community and relative popularity of PLT, at a time when Matthias's students might've been pretty distracted with their dissertations and interviewing, but most of those people eventually left, and were forgotten. Looks like there are currently some prolific contributors, but looks like even they aren't treated as peers by the cabal, in things professors think are important. I think there's a Racket community, but that it exists despite the fact that Racket isn't a community project. (It's funny to distinguish community from user base, in a forum about making money in contemporary dotcom world. :) -- racket-money is private. Please don't quote/forward/etc. elsewhere. https://linki.tools/racket-money/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "racket-money" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-money+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/5ef3d049.1c69fb81.3fe0e.26b4%40mx.google.com.
