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Sometimes - not always. Especially if it's not merely mediocre, but outright bad as postulated. (I don't think Python is bad, but I don't have the experience

Sometimes - not always. Especially if it's not merely mediocre, but outright bad as postulated. (I don't think Python is bad, but I don't have the experience with it to judge either.) All the community in the world is unlikely to make up for tools that I have to reverse engineer from disassembly to file proper bug reports against (too frequently necessary to even figure out if it's their bug or mine in the first place), or create workarounds for. If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place: It's all right there in the docs or obvious by design, right? (If the answer is no, is it actually a good tool?)

masklinn 13y ago
> If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place Then there's no community, there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. See: the vast majority of lisps.
- MaulingMonkey 13y ago
  > Then there's no community Communities survive my absence ;). But more importantly, the lack of a user community doesn't necessarily translate to the lack of an internal developer community outside the FOSS sphere, or lack of a feedback loop into that developer community. Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? For myself, I'd answer "none of the above". There are hundreds of devs behinds these tools, and I interact with next to none of them - and that works out great. > there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. I'm frequently entirely OK with this. Some of these tools will evolve without my input. Some of them will die (read: finally stabilize) when better alternatives surface (win/win!) Neither situation is generally going to be helped along significantly by throwing in my lot with an existing tool's user community. On the developer side of the equation, when even possible, joining is expensive: Time spent familiarizing with the codebase and coding standards, agreeing on bikeshed colors, wrangling contracts to avoid ending up like Sergey Aleynikov... > See: the vast majority of lisps. This may be heretical, but I'm afraid I don't grant that "the vast majority of lisps" were good tools, although I'll certainly grant that community inertia wasn't enough to save them.
  - lmm 13y ago
    > Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? I'd actually say yes to many of those. The main reason I switched away from my previous browser was the absence of certain extensions/userscripts; the reason I use the IDE I do is entirely down to the plugins.

masklinn 13y ago

> If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place Then there's no community, there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. See: the vast majority of lisps.

MaulingMonkey 13y ago
> Then there's no community Communities survive my absence ;). But more importantly, the lack of a user community doesn't necessarily translate to the lack of an internal developer community outside the FOSS sphere, or lack of a feedback loop into that developer community. Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? For myself, I'd answer "none of the above". There are hundreds of devs behinds these tools, and I interact with next to none of them - and that works out great. > there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. I'm frequently entirely OK with this. Some of these tools will evolve without my input. Some of them will die (read: finally stabilize) when better alternatives surface (win/win!) Neither situation is generally going to be helped along significantly by throwing in my lot with an existing tool's user community. On the developer side of the equation, when even possible, joining is expensive: Time spent familiarizing with the codebase and coding standards, agreeing on bikeshed colors, wrangling contracts to avoid ending up like Sergey Aleynikov... > See: the vast majority of lisps. This may be heretical, but I'm afraid I don't grant that "the vast majority of lisps" were good tools, although I'll certainly grant that community inertia wasn't enough to save them.
- lmm 13y ago
  > Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? I'd actually say yes to many of those. The main reason I switched away from my previous browser was the absence of certain extensions/userscripts; the reason I use the IDE I do is entirely down to the plugins.