[Gardeners] Resignation as CL Gardeners Green Thumb

[Duncan Rose]

On Thursday, July 13, 2006, at 05:32  pm, Paolo Amoroso wrote:

> "Brad Beveridge" <brad.beveridge at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Thanks for your time and effort being a Green Thumb.  I hope that
>> you'll stay on the Gardeners mailing list.
>
> Sure.
>
>
>> Our mailing list is very quiet of late, would anybody care to comment
>> as to why that could be?  Is there enough motivation left amongst us
>> to try and make our community more active again?
>
> Maybe there is motivation, but it mostly comes from "scratch an
> itch"-kind of projects, not generic, well intentioned suggestions on
> how things might be improved, in which there is no personal
> involvement and specific interest.  I think that those who did
> something over the past few months would have done it anyway, because
> it was something they felt they needed or liked.
>
> But I don't know whether motivation is enough to explain the quietness
> of this list and related projects.
>


I've been thinking about this too, on and off, over the last few days 
and weeks. What is it about Lisp that makes it difficult to build the 
kind of community that (say) Ruby has, or that Linux has? In the end I 
turned this question on its head and asked myself "what is it about 
[Ruby, Linux] that makes it easier to build communities?". Here are my 
thoughts (most of which are seriously half-baked, and likely wrong, but 
what the hell):

<sweeping generalisation mode>

1. Most communities are actually pretty small; the Ruby community seems 
to be mainly cheerleaders, I'm not convinced there's many people 
actively working on libraries and such. They've had a *couple* of 
people work on *a* library/framework that was useful (rails), but 
realistically how many people are gardening that now? I'd guess: not 
very many (perhaps no more than the original developers).

I suspect since Lispniks are more sophisticated (!) we may have fewer 
cheerleaders.

2. Most Lisp stuff is already managed; if you want to work to improve 
McCLIM or some other (active) project there's a good chance that a 
mailing list exists for it elsewhere so we don't see that traffic here 
-- this gives perhaps more of an impression of apathy than is fair. 
Many Lisp tools (either the compilers themselves, such as SBCL or 
OpenMCL, or a sizable library) have an active group or individual 
maintaining them who are too responsive to bug reports etc. (i.e. once 
a bug is noticed and reported there's a reasonable chance the 
maintainers will have it fixed PDQ).

3. The Linux community to me seems more centered around distributions 
than any specific tool or library (for specific tool or library 
support, it falls back to (2)) -- much of the community seems to me to 
center around improving 'a distribution' which might involve changes or 
documentation for more specific elements, but it is a reasonably large 
number of people working with a large body of code.

4. Perhaps these communities don't actually exist any more than the 
Lisp community exists; 'the community' consists of a number of 
bloggers, a collection of mailing lists for specific bits of code 
(kernel mailing list, Gnome mailing list etc. etc.), and a relatively 
small number of people involved in active code maintenance in each of 
those code areas (i.e. exactly the same as the 'Lisp community' only 
scaled up since more people are using Linux than Lisp).

</sweeping generalisation mode>


I still think the idea of gardening is a good one; I suspect we (as 'a 
community') just haven't yet found anything large enough to coalesce 
around that has enough scope so that everybody can help out at their 
respective ability level and feel that their input is useful. I get the 
impression that much of Lisp (at least the Free bits) is at the stage 
Linux was at 15 (ish) years ago; download the kernel, download the 
tools individually, jump through hoops building stuff, and with 
sufficient perseverance you end up with a useful (although likely 
bespoke) system you can play with (I enjoyed Linux at this stage :-). 
The proprietary Lisps seem to me to be more like distributions; they 
have GUIs and assorted tools / libraries, all packaged together (and 
documented consistently) and working out of the box.

Perhaps we need more 'distributions' but it seems to me Lisp people 
maybe like building from source and fitting the pieces together for 
themselves...

Maybe the time is not quite here for the Gardeners to take off; I'm 
sure the time is coming if not.

I think that's enough rambling from me for now ;-)

-Duncan



>
> Paolo
> -- 
> Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log - http://www.paoloamoroso.it/log
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