In the early days of Clojure, it was clear that Rich was reading every post on the Clojure mailing list. He didn't respond to every single thread, of course, but when new issues were raised, he would frequently chime in, "That's a good point, please create a patch for that" or "That's something that's never going to change."
This created a clear path for bug reports, feature requests, and improvement suggestions. Basically, the path was to post on the mailing list. If it was something that had been already discussed in the past, one could count on the community to point to the relevant thread. If it was something new, one could count on it eventually being evaluated by Rich and an official judgment made. The community was instructed not to submit any kind of patch without a go-ahead from Rich. I don't know what the path is now. I feel that in the past year, there have been several times where people have raised meaningful issues about Clojure and received no official response. It's hard to know whether this is an intentional "rejection through ignoring", or whether it's just that those messages happened to slip beneath the radar. Maybe Rich didn't see them, and without his go-ahead, no one moved forward with them. As a recent example, consider the issue I raised last month about sets, which in 1.3 were changed so that via several methods of construction (either literal notation or the hash-set constructor), they now throw an error, breaking code that previously worked, reducing the utility of set notation, and imposing on users the need to remember the idiosyncrasies of which methods of set construction impose this constraint and which don't. The majority of those who weighed in on the issue agreed with my complaint. The set issue was even discussed on the Mostly Lazy podcast as an example of how, even though Clojure gets a lot of the "big ideas" right, there seem to be a lot of "little things" that Clojure still hasn't nailed. In any case, there was a great deal of useful discussion about the set issue, and then... silence. There are a couple of points here: 1. I use Clojure regularly. The "little things" may be little, but when you use Clojure regularly, those little things do start to grate after a while. I would very much like to see Clojure on a path to resolve the little things, so that the language becomes increasingly pleasurable to use. To do this, the community would benefit for a very clear mechanism for raising, discussing, evaluating, and resolving these issues. The "hope that Rich reads the thread" approach doesn't appear to be working any more. For example, on whitehouse.gov, you can start a petition and if enough people sign the petition within a given length of time, the president's office will issue an official statement about it. That's the kind of thing I'm thinking about. Rich's time is valuable, but it would be nice to know that any issue that reaches a certain level of visibility will receive an official "yea" or "nay" rather than languish in silence. 2. There was significant support for my suggestion to revert set behavior back to 1.2 and solve the problem which motivated the change by bringing array-maps into accord with the behavior of the other maps and sets. This email is also my way of bumping the thread and bringing it again to everyone's attention. This is something I'd very much like to see resolved. --Mark -- 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
