On Monday, 8 September 2014 at 16:47:15 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
And now we all calm down a little, ok? The D community is as diverse as the language and even if three people yell in the same tone, it doesn't mean everyone else believes the same.
I know that, but newbies don't know that. So it is important that you voice your opinion.
It is important to nurture. That means understand why new people are engaged and back it up if it is constructive. With 25+ years of experience with online communities and 3+ years of full time studies of creativity/motivation in online communities I believe the following is close to the truth:
1. Recruiting newbies is even more important than retaining oldbies.
- Retention is important, but most oldbies will leave (after ~3 years). This is natural and healthy.
- Some of the oldbies that stay, some do it for the wrong reasons (e.g. the online community being their main source of self worth), this can lead to dysfunctional situations.
2. Newbie bashing is common. Backing and understanding what drives motivated newbies is important for growth. You need to sustain that motivation to grow.
3. People generally don't want more work in their spare time. They want fun, freedom and a go-happy friendly environment. So you need to provide that atmosphere for newbies.
4. Newbies sometimes come with a fresh outlook and are a source for understanding what aspects of the culture hold back growth and performance.
A bunch of unwritten rules tend to lead to unpleasant situations. It is important for a development community to align their attitudes to the freedoms implied by the license. A Boost license comes with a set of freedoms that I would expect the community to back fully.
Undermining the license by unwritten rules is counter productive for the following reasons:
1. Commercial entities will not "read" the unwritten rules. They will look at the source code, the change log and the license. There is no good reason for having forum members adhere to a separate set of rules where they have their freedom restricted.
2. Unwritten rules lead to newbie bashing, because newbies cannot possibly know the unwritten rules, which in turn leads to recruitment problems.
The main branch is not inviting since it should aim for stability, contributing to it is more likely to lead to frustration than gratification.
Making your own mods is motivating since it is gratifying to be able to add a new feature in 3 hours. Exchanging mods with other newbies (which I am in a way) increase the motivation.
Basically, group formation nurture participation and involvement. It is important to encourage that when opportunities arise. E.g. when new people arrive and express enthusiasm.
that is understood by the front-end like "!" or "~". Also you might want to consider adding .opSqrt for consistency.
Yes, that would probably be the more consistent way to do it in the long run.
very unusual. Well, it is your fork I'd say. If you ever make any pull requests be sure to propose one feature at a time,
I don't have any plans to make pull requests atm, I only have a few hours per week to spend on this. However, I try to keep changes local (which is not all that easy in parser.c).
