lack of contributors

[Brian Rice]

Since today is April Fools Day, I almost sent an "[ANN] "Project  
Cancelled" email. The other email idea was "Slate renamed to Slava"  
to joke about pandering to the Java set and Factor's author as an odd  
side-effect. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to take seriously in  
this email.

On Apr 1, 2006, at 6:28 AM, Waldemar Kornewald wrote:

> Hi Brian,
> you wondered what is wrong with this project? I don't claim to know  
> this, either, but here are a few possible issues (let's hope you  
> don't misunderstand these suggestions):
>
> Lack of a compiler: even very simple apps are unusable. This should  
> have highest priority. Slate must become usable for real-world  
> apps. Libraries can be extended by others. The core coders must  
> work on internals.

The core coders (Lee) left. THAT's the problem. I'm not blind to the  
fact that the speed of Slate is a serious problem. Todd Fleming told  
me himself that the disappointing speed of the UI disheartened him to  
stop working on it.

The irony here is staggering. I just don't know what to do about it.  
Bringing back Lee would have its own attendant problems - he's really  
just not easy to work with.

> Fight for C++ and Java programmers! It's a lot easier to get them  
> on board than die-hard, conservative Squeak programmers. Slate  
> should better be initially seen as a second language, not as a  
> replacement for your beloved main programming language. There is no  
> obvious reason why Slate should be better than Lisp or Squeak.  
> Concentrate on other communities.

Yeah, you're right about who to advocate to; I've definitely thought  
about it since day one, but I'm no promoter. I am fundamentally a  
pretty depressed guy who's in pain all the time; when the pain goes  
away (in a couple of weeks I'm hoping), I'll get better again,  
hopefully permanently, but in the mean time I cannot play PR-man.

So, if you want this to happen, help me make it happen. Do some work  
to make site improvements or blurbs that will speak to the right  
people. Be a language marketer. Someone has to do it.

> You're basically a one-man team. There is no guarantee that this  
> project will stay alive for a long time. This relates to:
> Sometimes people are pissed off by your mentality. Stay calm. Be  
> polite. Keep in mind that everything you say on IRC is read by many  
> people. Do you think they will ever want to risk being called an  
> idiot?

Well, I need people around who are really competent and go-getters,  
not people who talk all the time and don't send patches. I'm also a  
harsh guy, and I will tell people exactly what I think, rather than  
yield pleasantries and insult them when they're not around. I  
actually appreciate being yelled at if I deserve it. It's a matter of  
culture and some built-in personality quirks. Why is it such a "risk"  
to be called an idiot? Is what happens on IRC suddenly a big deal  
elsewhere? The world is full of much worse things, things that are  
insane and sad and have real consequences, like the 8 people who were  
killed by a gun-toting maniac just a block from my house last  
weekend. Calling someone an idiot just does not rate on my "human  
interaction Richter scale".

In any case, the people with patches get heard and catered-to. The  
people who need everything explained to them and don't like  
fundamental ideas of the author sometimes get insulted when they nag  
too much. If you don't like something in Slate, change it. The source  
is there, and "darcs send -o" is available for anyone to contribute.

> You have high expectations. People don't want to be pushed. Let  
> them work on something, but don't expect anything as long as they  
> are not established team members.

This is a fundamental problem with me - I am not a master programmer  
and cannot do everything that Slate needs. I also would like Slate to  
be usable before I am drawing a pension. Everyone else sees Slate  
from the outside-in; for me, I feel my life ticking away and it  
becomes personal.

So I want people to work intensely on it so that the project is not  
filled with hundreds of half-done projects and nothing useful. I  
don't even care if they work on it sporadically, as long as they get  
something ***done*** in the time they have. Because projects which  
are half-done will be worked on by someone else, who has no insight  
into the person's thought process (unless they comment code liberally  
and document it, which is rare and takes effort), and therefore finds  
it easier to rewrite it from scratch. Case in point: Slate has had no  
less than ***FOUR*** SDL GUI back-ends.

My problem right now is that each of my contributors takes as much  
time from me just to communicate with them (just as is happening  
right now) as they put back in to the project.

> Slate is too complex. It does not feel very elegant. You have to  
> learn too many concepts and rules (inheritance, role-based  
> dispatch, precedence, traits slots, delegation, macros,  
> syntax, ...). You should take this more seriously. One quickly gets  
> overwhelmed by Slate.

I'm hard-pressed to find what I should do about it. That's why I  
invite people to write tutorials covering it, because the manual is a  
***reference*** and not didactic at all. It cannot be my job to teach  
people Slate, because I live in it and cannot get my mind out of that  
perspective. I just CAN'T do it. Similarly, if I wrote tutorials, I  
would have a harder time "swapping out" that information and  
"swapping in" Slate internal code information.

I am going to re-iterate this: it cannot be my job to write teaching  
materials. If you find Slate too hard, then help others find it  
easier or don't use it and stop whining. Casual users just do not  
belong in a pre-1.0 language community.

And Slate is that complex because those features are powerful. Remove  
any of those, and you remove the purpose of the project. I welcome  
simplification (Slate was originally supposed to be a concatenative  
language, for example), but you are surely not going to be the source  
of it.

> The website greets you with a lot of information. Is the feature  
> list really needed on the front page? Those features don't tell me  
> very much. We want to know the *advantages* of Slate, a few  
> *examples*, and a few direct *comparisons* (Java, Squeak, ...).

Would you like to do that? The website is made from a darcs  
repository at http://slate.tunes.org/repos/site/ . I would willingly  
accept patches for it. If they are not "polished", I can make a  
branch for the variation and try to improve it. At least make some  
mock-up pages or something.

Honestly, though, if all this is hot air and you don't do anything  
substantial about it, don't expect me to be pleasant to you.

--
-Brian
http://tunes.org/~water/brice.vcf

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