I think Yegge clarified in a follow-up post that what he really meant to say was "say yes to USERS", not "say yes to FEATURES", but in his typical off-the-cuff ranty writing style, he had accidentally conflated the two.
As far as saying yes to every feature, I think that is obviously not a great idea. It is easy to make the argument that one of the reasons Java became successful are the features that it said no to: No to pointers, no to multiple inheritance, no to operator overloading. As far as saying yes to USERS. I think Yegge brings up a really important point about a critical problem that plagues not just clojure but all open source communities in general. Basically the blowhard who thinks he is smarter than the average person and who enjoys letting other people know it. We all have some element of self-interest in our hearts. When you get paid to write software the reward is obvious. When you are contributing to open source what is the motivation? If you have the soul of an artist maybe you just want to create something beautiful. But there are a lot of others for whom contributing to open source is an ego trip. They haven't gotten the recognition that they feel they deserve in other parts of their life, so they decided that by writing something cool and putting it on the internet then they will be cool too. When you are getting paid for software you have a direct incentive to make your software as user friendly as possible. If it "just works" for the users and they like it and they can happily use it without ever looking at a manual, then you get more users and more money. People in open source want more users too but they don't necessarily want it to be user friendly. In fact often I feel there is this huge incentive to NOT be user friendly. It is like hazing. You get to say things like "That is not the functional way, I know the right way but you don't, I am better than you." or "Why would anyone want to do that? The problem you are stumped on has such an obvious solution to me that I can't even understand why you have a problem, I am better than you." There is this attitude of "I figured how to write my own .emacs all by myself, from reading the forums and the documentation, because I was too socially maladjusted to ask anyone for help. Why can't you?" This poisonous attitude is perfectly exemplified in this thread by James Keats. I think it's important to recognize that we are all human beings, which means that we are herd animals, which means that we all have genetically hardwired responses to desire to be part of a hierarchy and we desire to place ourselves higher up on that hierarchy. This is why we have bullies in kindergarten. But just because you were bullied in kindergarten does not make it okay for you to bully newbies over the internet now. Back then it was not okay for the bigger kids to pick on the smaller kids and right now just because you are smarter than someone does not make you a better person. We are herd animals but we are also civilized human beings, we can rise above our base animal desires to put other people down, we don't have to give in to our desire to feel like we are part of a special club. I think the clojure community has in general been much better about this than some other open source communities, but as clojure gets more popular, the ego trippers are starting to join the party, the guys who want to say "I use clojure, clojure is the best language of all, I am better than you!" The guys who don't care about the pragmatic beauty of clojure and just want to be a big man in a new tribe. I think it would be good to not pay too much attention to such people and say yes to the users. Say yes to the newbies, yes to the object oriented people not by making clojure more object oriented, but by not shutting them out of the discourse and laughing them off as just "object oriented people". As someone whose name I can't remember right now once said, "There are no bad students, only bad teachers." -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
