Fwiw the correct engineering response here seems to be to acknowledge the subset of Dan's criticisms that are valid/reasonable, fix those, and get back to work. Criticising Dan's motives etc isn't a productive path (imo) If there are low hanging fruit fixes on such a successful project,(the build/test thing certainly seems to be one) that is a *good* thing. Yes the HN crowd can be a bit rough (I am plinkplonk on HN, fwiw) , and often unreasonable, but hey anyone running an open source project can't afford to get disturbed by weird discussions on HN.
All projects have bugs, and if someone has an uncanny knack for surfacing heisenbugs, that is a good thing, irrespective of communication style. My 2 cents (I am just tinkering with Julia and don't use it anger yet, but after some discussion with Viral (who is my neighbor) am considering jumping in - Julia is a brilliant project). As a prospective contributor to Julia, I am encouraged by Stefan's approach to this) regards, Ravi
