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When I say "no one would listen" I mean the long and tiresome discussions. I saw people just repeating themselves, without taking on board what other people wer

by pbiggar 14y ago

When I say "no one would listen" I mean the long and tiresome discussions. I saw people just repeating themselves, without taking on board what other people were saying. I never saw these discussions end well. There was no consensus - the discussions eventually died out without any progress. I think there might be some Stockholm Syndrome there. The volunteers in the PHP bug tracker are dicks! Or were, it's been 3 years so things may have changed. And I'm not talking about responses to trolls, I mean to ordinary users. I mean they disregard the feelings of the other people in the community, not their code. I'm not really talking about how dysfunctional the coding practices were, I mean the actual community dynamics. It felt a lot like trolls feeding trolls.

smsm42 14y ago
There indeed was no consensus on the topic of strict typing and on some other topics - but it's only natural, people have different opinions and sometimes there's just no agreement between them. Especially if you are advocating wide regard for all people in the community, you have to accept that sometimes there would be no way to reach a decision that is agreeable to everyone. In the strict typing case that is what happened, there was no approach that was satisfactory to all, so the decision was to remain with the status quo. I don't think this makes PHP internals somehow hostile or "poisonous" - disagreement is a natural part of the process in such a diverse community, and in case there's no agreement on a new feature the natural way is to remain with the status quo.
- pbiggar 14y ago
  My point is not that there should be consensus. My point is how the discussion went (and many similar discussions, not just one). Poison comes from how community members treat each other, not whether or not they can agree on something. I've spent major time in 3 open source projects, gcc, Mozilla and PHP. All of them suffered from similar disagreement, from old code, from old decisions they need to move away from. The difference was that Mozilla and gcc manage to do it without being poisonous.
  - smsm42 14y ago
    Unfortunately, I'm still not sure what you mean by "poisonous". To me it sounds like "community is poisonous because discussions are held wrong, and the discussions are wrong because community is poisonous". Maybe it's just me but I have hard time understanding what exactly is the problem here except for the fact that you obviously dislike something about PHP community. But if somebody asked me what exactly you dislike and what you'd have fixed if you could - I couldn't really give any meaningful answer.
    - pbiggar 14y ago
      To be honest, I think you are trying really hard to pretend my points aren't made rather than trying to use my points to investigate the phenomenon. I'll admit I'm not explaining them terribly well - its been 4 years since I've taken active part - but there's enough information in there that you could use it as a starting point if you were truly interested, which I think you aren't.
      - smsm42 14y ago
        Sorry, your assumption about my motives is wrong. I would be really interested in finding out what exactly people on internals did so you call PHP dev community "poisonous" on every available opportunity (this is not the first time I read this from you, though it is the first time I had a chance to try and find out why). Unfortunately, I was unable to understand what offended you so much. If you didn't guess it yet, I was present on the internals list at that time (and long before and after that) so I had the opportunity to personally observe all those tiresome and long discussions and many more. So I thought I have pretty good starting point and enough information to at least try to understand your complaints. However, I still failed to figure out why you think PHP dev community is "poisonous". I guess it's not to be, well, at least I tried.
        pbiggar 14y ago
        I didn't assume anything about your motives, but I didn't mean to be harsh. You do come across as an "apologist" for the community though. There are of course many communities that behave similiarly, but that doesn't make them healthy. Look at it this way - imagine you had a conversation with a group of people 4 years ago, and they acted like dicks. Now, four years later someone challenges you to explain how they were dicks. It's really hard to give an answer better than "i dont know, they were just dicks alright" :(

by pbiggar 14y ago

smsm42 14y ago

There indeed was no consensus on the topic of strict typing and on some other topics - but it's only natural, people have different opinions and sometimes there's just no agreement between them. Especially if you are advocating wide regard for all people in the community, you have to accept that sometimes there would be no way to reach a decision that is agreeable to everyone. In the strict typing case that is what happened, there was no approach that was satisfactory to all, so the decision was to remain with the status quo. I don't think this makes PHP internals somehow hostile or "poisonous" - disagreement is a natural part of the process in such a diverse community, and in case there's no agreement on a new feature the natural way is to remain with the status quo.

pbiggar 14y ago
My point is not that there should be consensus. My point is how the discussion went (and many similar discussions, not just one). Poison comes from how community members treat each other, not whether or not they can agree on something. I've spent major time in 3 open source projects, gcc, Mozilla and PHP. All of them suffered from similar disagreement, from old code, from old decisions they need to move away from. The difference was that Mozilla and gcc manage to do it without being poisonous.
- smsm42 14y ago
  Unfortunately, I'm still not sure what you mean by "poisonous". To me it sounds like "community is poisonous because discussions are held wrong, and the discussions are wrong because community is poisonous". Maybe it's just me but I have hard time understanding what exactly is the problem here except for the fact that you obviously dislike something about PHP community. But if somebody asked me what exactly you dislike and what you'd have fixed if you could - I couldn't really give any meaningful answer.
  - pbiggar 14y ago
    To be honest, I think you are trying really hard to pretend my points aren't made rather than trying to use my points to investigate the phenomenon. I'll admit I'm not explaining them terribly well - its been 4 years since I've taken active part - but there's enough information in there that you could use it as a starting point if you were truly interested, which I think you aren't.
    - smsm42 14y ago
      Sorry, your assumption about my motives is wrong. I would be really interested in finding out what exactly people on internals did so you call PHP dev community "poisonous" on every available opportunity (this is not the first time I read this from you, though it is the first time I had a chance to try and find out why). Unfortunately, I was unable to understand what offended you so much. If you didn't guess it yet, I was present on the internals list at that time (and long before and after that) so I had the opportunity to personally observe all those tiresome and long discussions and many more. So I thought I have pretty good starting point and enough information to at least try to understand your complaints. However, I still failed to figure out why you think PHP dev community is "poisonous". I guess it's not to be, well, at least I tried.
      - pbiggar 14y ago
        I didn't assume anything about your motives, but I didn't mean to be harsh. You do come across as an "apologist" for the community though. There are of course many communities that behave similiarly, but that doesn't make them healthy. Look at it this way - imagine you had a conversation with a group of people 4 years ago, and they acted like dicks. Now, four years later someone challenges you to explain how they were dicks. It's really hard to give an answer better than "i dont know, they were just dicks alright" :(