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Wow, that is wild! And yes, that kind of thing can totally drive off contributors. Long ago I went to a local Scala unconference. At the time there were at lea

Wow, that is wild! And yes, that kind of thing can totally drive off contributors. Long ago I went to a local Scala unconference. At the time there were at least two popular web frameworks, and one of the authors was in attendance. [1] Chatting during one of the breaks, I asked him some question about his framework, something about testability of apps. He quickly grew enraged and shouted at me. I slunk off, wondering what I had done wrong. At the bar after the conference, a few different people apologized to me for his outburst. Not him, mind you, just other people. I was like, "Aha, I recognize this. He's a missing stair." [2] He was clearly an asshole to people on the regular, but the community just put up with it. That was the last time I went to a Scala event. Life's too short to put up with bullies, or people who accommodate them. [1] I no longer remember which framework or which author. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

lmm 4y ago
Presumably Lift / David Pollak, which haven't been relevant for about 10 years; the Scala community has gone through a lot of effort to remove bad actors since then, for the record (and while the drama lingers on, I don't think anyone would deny that standards are much higher now).
- wpietri 4y ago
  I'm glad to hear it, but for me that still leaves Scala one down on every other language. Once bitten, twice shy.
  - mst 4y ago
    This is a poor line of reasoning - pretty much every community acquires an ass at some point and when it's not something they've dealt with previously it often takes them a while to figure out how to react. The question is how they do react once they've figured it out, and Scala's come along in leaps and bounds in that regard. If anything, you should be more wary of groups that haven't yet dealt with that problem, because they've had no chance to develop the relevant antibodies yet. I mean, I get it, if you have a bad experience with X, it's going to colour your perceptions going forwards, being human be like that - but similarly to throwing away a dice because you rolled a nat 1 with it at an inopportune moment, it's far from the most rational response available to you.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      A community isn't "a dice". It has state. Indeed, dice are precisely designed to be uncorrelated roll to roll. You're claiming it's still weighted, just in a different direction now. Did they really clean things up? Or is it just talk about how things have changed? The way to find out for sure is for me to spend time in the community. It could be better, or the abuse could just be better hidden. And honestly, given the revolution in recent years in codes of conduct and DEI, I suspect my odds are better with newer communities, as there are now plenty of "antibodies" out there. But all this tickled my memory. Wasn't their an FP advocate who was also an abusive jackass and far-right kook just a few years back? Yes, yes there was. And gosh, what community was he prominent in? Scala. So if I had waited 5 years and given Scala another chance, I would still have landed in a community where there was significant support for abusive behavior. Maybe he was booted in 2019 or so? Hard to tell from the web. From his tweets, it look like he has crept back in. Is that because he and Scala are worlds better? or is it just the usual missing stair routine that I observed more than a decade ago? I don't know, can't tell, and won't be finding out, because there are plenty of other technologies for me to pick up.
      - mst 4y ago
        > given the revolution in recent years in codes of conduct and DEI, I suspect my odds are better with newer communities, as there are now plenty of "antibodies" out there. A lot of that stuff can easily just enable a different set of broken stairs though. Crafting a code of conduct such that it makes it easy to deal with both reactionary -and- wokescold flavoured bullies is something of an art form, and I've seen a number of communities manage to completely fail at one of the two albeit usually in a very well-meaning way. Antibodies are great up until they give you an auto-immune syndrome, basically. (I definitely saw the far right kook get defenestrated, though the community may still be sufficiently quokka to've let him sneak back in through a different door, I'm mostly an observer here - and mostly only looking at all because as a veteran code of conduct advocate I tend to find the various failure modes worth examining)
        wpietri 4y ago
  - oxnrtr 4y ago
    Not much has changed, no worries.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Hah, thanks! A nice counterpoint to the person who said otherwise. And especially to the person who seems to think that I must have some sort of brain damage to be concerned.
      - oxnrtr 4y ago
        One way Scala experts deal with people disagreeing with them is to contact those peoples' employers/universities, maybe you should revise your profile accordingly.
        lmm 4y ago
        Come on, this is FUD. You're talking about one or two guys who got into an enormous personal fight years back and were condemned by everyone else.
        oxnrtr 4y ago
        Who condemned Martin? Sources please.

lmm 4y ago

Presumably Lift / David Pollak, which haven't been relevant for about 10 years; the Scala community has gone through a lot of effort to remove bad actors since then, for the record (and while the drama lingers on, I don't think anyone would deny that standards are much higher now).

wpietri 4y ago
I'm glad to hear it, but for me that still leaves Scala one down on every other language. Once bitten, twice shy.
- mst 4y ago
  This is a poor line of reasoning - pretty much every community acquires an ass at some point and when it's not something they've dealt with previously it often takes them a while to figure out how to react. The question is how they do react once they've figured it out, and Scala's come along in leaps and bounds in that regard. If anything, you should be more wary of groups that haven't yet dealt with that problem, because they've had no chance to develop the relevant antibodies yet. I mean, I get it, if you have a bad experience with X, it's going to colour your perceptions going forwards, being human be like that - but similarly to throwing away a dice because you rolled a nat 1 with it at an inopportune moment, it's far from the most rational response available to you.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    A community isn't "a dice". It has state. Indeed, dice are precisely designed to be uncorrelated roll to roll. You're claiming it's still weighted, just in a different direction now. Did they really clean things up? Or is it just talk about how things have changed? The way to find out for sure is for me to spend time in the community. It could be better, or the abuse could just be better hidden. And honestly, given the revolution in recent years in codes of conduct and DEI, I suspect my odds are better with newer communities, as there are now plenty of "antibodies" out there. But all this tickled my memory. Wasn't their an FP advocate who was also an abusive jackass and far-right kook just a few years back? Yes, yes there was. And gosh, what community was he prominent in? Scala. So if I had waited 5 years and given Scala another chance, I would still have landed in a community where there was significant support for abusive behavior. Maybe he was booted in 2019 or so? Hard to tell from the web. From his tweets, it look like he has crept back in. Is that because he and Scala are worlds better? or is it just the usual missing stair routine that I observed more than a decade ago? I don't know, can't tell, and won't be finding out, because there are plenty of other technologies for me to pick up.
    - mst 4y ago
      > given the revolution in recent years in codes of conduct and DEI, I suspect my odds are better with newer communities, as there are now plenty of "antibodies" out there. A lot of that stuff can easily just enable a different set of broken stairs though. Crafting a code of conduct such that it makes it easy to deal with both reactionary -and- wokescold flavoured bullies is something of an art form, and I've seen a number of communities manage to completely fail at one of the two albeit usually in a very well-meaning way. Antibodies are great up until they give you an auto-immune syndrome, basically. (I definitely saw the far right kook get defenestrated, though the community may still be sufficiently quokka to've let him sneak back in through a different door, I'm mostly an observer here - and mostly only looking at all because as a veteran code of conduct advocate I tend to find the various failure modes worth examining)
      - wpietri 4y ago
- oxnrtr 4y ago
  Not much has changed, no worries.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Hah, thanks! A nice counterpoint to the person who said otherwise. And especially to the person who seems to think that I must have some sort of brain damage to be concerned.
    - oxnrtr 4y ago
      One way Scala experts deal with people disagreeing with them is to contact those peoples' employers/universities, maybe you should revise your profile accordingly.
      - lmm 4y ago
        Come on, this is FUD. You're talking about one or two guys who got into an enormous personal fight years back and were condemned by everyone else.
        oxnrtr 4y ago
        Who condemned Martin? Sources please.