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What even is a "$language community"? Lately it seems like everything has some weird community aspect to it that becomes relevant because (?), single player ga
by philippejara 4y ago
What even is a "$language community"?
Lately it seems like everything has some weird community aspect to it that becomes relevant because (?), single player games have communities now, even brands and, I guess now, programming languages(certainly enough to have a VP of community). Sure stuff like comp.lang.$language has been a thing for forever but that was not at that level.
I probably went into a bit of a ramble but the point i'm getting at is that odds are this "community" is most likely not representative of the people that actually use the language and to not assume people who do are automatically part of it, not saying you were, but some words of caution I suppose.
And furthermore, although that is unrelated to your point but more in a general statement for the younger people: You don't need to join a community or even talk to people to use a language or api or whatever, they're tools and using them or not should be based on where your technical interests lie or what you're trying to solve, not trying to be part of a social circle where the only thing you have in common is that you all wrote some lines of code in a certain script. Don't let yourself be defined by such things and don't do it to yourselves.
- enneff 4y agoOpen source projects definitely have communities and it’s not an artificial thing. You have the developers and consumers of the project and they have a lot of social interactions.
- philippejara 4y agoNeither are the other communities listed artificial(maybe the brands? not sure). Open source projects communities I'd relate more to the comp.lang.$language, and I guess the social interaction would be relevant, but are there really enough people contributing to a project to have a "vp of community"? this is what raised the red flag for me, well that and someone making up a "cute" name to refer to themselves as part of an in-group like languages were youtube channels("Rustaceans"). I guess the edit I made would clear up where I was with my previous comment.
- theshrike79 4y agoMust be a generational thing or something. I've used a ton of languages and I've never interacted with the "community" of said language. I might've been on an (unofficial?) IRC channel for the language, but that's about it. Never felt the need to belong in a community for a hecking programming language =)
- eternalban 4y agoIIRC the trend, including the obligatory cutesy avatar (and PL as a life-style choice /g), started with Java. And Java was ~coincidental with internet breaking out of universities. So my guess would be that it's 'an internet thing'. p.s. 'Rotary Club' popped into my head after posting this. Possibly this is a manifestation of "learned" (lol) and professional associations for a domain that famously lacks professional credentials, so 'birds of a feather' naturally form around the specialized tools and their users. And we get PL feel good conferences, the language hero (Gosling, Pike, et al.), the stuffed animals, and the rest of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_societies#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_societies#History