Is this much drama around a tiny niche language normal? I've been happily using Python for over a decade and never encountered weird, dramatic behavior by its creators or main developers.
Could it be that some languages, through the target audience they attract, seal their disastrous fate? By that I mean languages that attract nerds like me or peculiar math-oriented minds who can nit pick at every single detail.
You wouldn't expect this much nit from a mass-scale enterprise language like Java.
What "drama"? This person's original blog post[0] seems to have merely expressed general frustrations with the Racket language and ecosystem. It's not clear to me whether anything dramatic happened here.
Small languages, especially languages without an organization behind them, don't have anybody to manage the oddities of the humans creating it. Python had that one core developer that was banned by the oversight board. There was quite a bit of drama around that, but it was buried in the boring Bureaucracy of it all.
I'd be surprised if some of the Java developers wouldn't be assholes or weird, just statistically. The difference there is that you don't interact with the individual developers. Oracle handle all of that internally.
* Racket is for great programmers who don't care about whether they have the latest JS or Python community commodity keywords on their resume. You can be ridiculously productive with it.
* Over the years, the academic priorities and investment of Racket have been its greatest strength, but also sometimes a weakness.
* Yes, getting good at Scheme or Racket and/or Common Lisp will make you a better programmer, but a less employable one. Keep it secret, not on your resume. (Though, if you write blog posts to promote your personal brand, you can do a rare post on Lisps, with a carefully-tuned level of casual curiosity, so that readers think you are a smart and savvy brogrammer, but not an actual nerd. Be sure dilute the Lisp on your blog, with some currently popular other keywords, to signal in a way recognizable to bros that you are gettin' it done, in a bro fist-bumping way, with your stacks and workflows and sprints and standups and OKRs and KPIs and RSUs.)
- Is there a LISP dialect that doesn't suffer from this problem? I can see that from time to time LISP projects start taking off just do die a year later and I'm stuck using Emacs (Lighttable comes into mind)
It was developer experience that precipitated this fallout, a language usually needs to be growing in user base for the developer experience to improve as people complain and tackle problems they encounter.
The old linked thread had some prominent figure saying “but just do <inconvenient thing>” in response to every issue, if the language isn’t growing, only people accustomed to the inconveniences stick around.
So, I’d say it used to be Clojure, but now I doubt there is one.
Incidentally these are all languages that come preinstalled out of the box on Debian. [1] So that leads me to suspect this person might be trying to develop something in extremis, with zero connection to the internet whatsoever and zero tools except what comes preinstalled on a typical Linux box.
Racket frustrates me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36541758 - June 2023 (127 comments)