Switching to discourse.org

[Abhinav Sharma]

Hello @racket team!

I find myself getting more and more involved with lisps and functional programming in general, especially Julia and Racket. I'd like to know your opinions on upgrading from the mailing list and moving to a more dynamic and open source platform for discussion like http://www.discourse.org/

This is used for Rust as well as Julia programming language discussions and the content is quite readily available to discover as opposed to the mailing lists. 

- Best,
Abhinav

[Jay McCarthy]

I am an old fart. When I look at the Rust discourse [1], the UI looks
exactly the same to me as our mailing list interface [2]. When I look
at the Discourse advertisements, it talks about stuff like notifying
you by email when there are messages... which is exactly what a
mailing list does all the time. Can you help an old person understand
why this is better?

Jay

1. https://internals.rust-lang.org
2. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/racket-users

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--
Jay McCarthy
Associate Professor
PLT @ CS @ UMass Lowell
http://jeapostrophe.github.io

"Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing,
for ye are laying the foundation of a great work.
And out of small things proceedeth that which is great."
- D&C 64:33

[Abhinav Sharma]

From the surface, yes they do look the similar but Rust site  also keeps track of the views, mentions, trending topic,

On the other hand, we could still be using IRC instead of Slack/Gitter. It's good experience that "old" people see through these differences but new users would be expecting these more and more.

- Abhinav

> email to racket-dev+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.

[Neil Van Dyke]

Email lists are still the best fully-open, privacy-respecting system we
have for this right now.

Everyone else either wants to own their users and monetize violating
their users' privacy or their general power over users -- *or* they
misunderstand the medium and technology, such that they don't realize
that they are violating their users this way, without even getting paid
for it.

With the email lists, you can plug your own privacy-protecting, offline,
distributed user agent into this, and do all sorts of things, including
better threading, powerful rules-based scoring/ranking, automated
collaborative filtering, and even autonomous behavior on your behalf.
Many people had this functionality 20 years ago, atop email and Usenet.

Why most people don't know this: The first dotcom gold rush twisted how
systems are architected, so that dotcoms could build themselves in as
middlemen, snooping and having control over people. And (only
half-joking) a bunch of Californians started a convention of being all
coked up on "performance enhancement" off-label abuse of prescription
meds, which helped them to churn out more lines of shoddy code, without
the annoying distractions of considering the impact and ethics of what
they were doing. And then successive generations of new programmers
came along, and mimicked what they saw, and were actively nudged by
dotcoms' programming tutorials and toolkits and such, to do systems
architecture in secretly user-hostile ways.

(It's non-ideal that the Racket email lists are hosted by Google, at
this time, but at least -- with the SMTP/POP/IMAP/etc. distributed
architecture, designed before snooping and control became the dominant
business model for dotcoms -- individual users still have the option of
defeating intimate cross-site profiling in this instance.)

[Abhinav Sharma]

That's a wonderfully driven explanation :)

Btw, discourse.org is free and open source so we can have something like discourse.racket.org on our own servers.

I understand that there's a strong feeling against it and if no need is felt regarding the change - I'm okay with this and I'll drop the issue.

P.S. The "Inside Racket" series is amazing - I'm learning loads from that! Thanks everyone)

[Neil Van Dyke]

BTW, that's just my own view, as one Racket user. There are sure to be
other opinions about this, among Racket users, and among the Racket high
priests.

(Racket has roots in the old-school Scheme universe, which I always
thought was especially individualistic, with lots of independent thinking.)

[sirinath]

My opinion is  discourse. Also another alternative would be Flarum (http://flarum.org/)

[George Neuner]

As another "old fart", I have to chime in here.

On Mon, 6 Feb 2017 17:38:21 +0530, Abhinav Sharma
<abhi...@gmail.com> wrote:

>On the other hand, we could still be using IRC instead of Slack/Gitter.
>It's good experience that "old" people see through these differences but
>new users would be expecting these more and more.

Your experience may be different, but I find chat absolutely useless
for any kind of meaningful discussion. Take more than 30 seconds to
compose a message and the other participants start wondering whether
or not you have left.

Writing a detailed message may take minutes, or hours. It may be days
(or weeks) before you have the required information. With email - or
equivalently a posting group - you can take the time necessary to
write something concise and meaningful rather than spew a bunch of
semi-coordinated thoughts.


Then too, I appreciate that people who see my questions and are
inclined to help are busy themselves and that considerable time may
pass before they have a chance to respond (other than maybe to say
"I'll have to get back to you").

<flame>
The problem as I see it is not "new" users per se, but *young* users
who have been conditioned by texting, IM, etc. to expect immediate
gratification. They prefer "rendezvous" communication because waiting
for an asynchronous response, by email or whatever, inconveniences
*them*. Only rarely do they consider whether an in-person "meeting"
might be inconveniencing someone else.

The same could be said of the old game of "telephone tag", but many
young people today have never heard of it. 8-)
</flame>


Now, unlike the annoying desktop IM client that your boss insists you
leave open, I do realize that the people hanging out on IRC, etc. are
there because they want to be ... but (presumably) willing
participation can't compensate for the inherent difficulty of carrying
on a meaningful conversation there.

This message took ~5 minutes to compose: it would not have been a very
good candidate for a chat session. ;-)


YMMV. Apologies for ranting, but you struck a nerve.
George

[Matthias Felleisen]

> On Feb 7, 2017, at 1:17 AM, George Neuner <gneu...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> @flame{

> The problem as I see it is not "new" users per se, but *young* users
> who have been conditioned by texting, IM, etc. to expect immediate
> gratification. They prefer "rendezvous" communication because waiting
> for an asynchronous response, by email or whatever, inconveniences
> *them*. Only rarely do they consider whether an in-person "meeting"
> might be inconveniencing someone else.

@unflame{It may inconvenience them, but it also costs them a lot.
They fail to understand that they are surfing on words and that
they have no clue what a dive into the words brings in terms of
understanding and satisfaction.}

@theft{Quote shamelessly paraphrased from some newspaper article,
which quoted some author, whose name escapes me completely now.}

> The same could be said of the old game of "telephone tag", but many
> young people today have never heard of it. 8-)
> }

— Matthias

[Stephen De Gabrielle]

@(add1) for marking up email in scribble instead of HTML
@(require pict/face)
@(face* 'normal 'huge #f default-face-color 0 -3)

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Kind regards,
Stephen
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[Robby Findler]

Okay, yet another old fart who chimes in here (and look, I am top-posting! ;).

I have to say there is something wonderful and amazing about joining
into a global conversation centered around a topic that we all enjoy
greatly, especially because there aren't enough people within earshot
who are interested in the topic?

In other words: do all of the exchanges in life have to be the
hours/days of think time between utterances? Should we not appreciate
each medium for what it is?

Robby

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[Neil Van Dyke]

Optional/intermittent instant chat (like IRC) is great for
watercooler-like social bonding of geodistributed team members.
Especially if it's ephemeral, not something that's logged/monitored, and
not too accessible to any boss.

For very work-related, rapid, interactive communication, mandatory
instant chat can also work for on-duty/on-call devops/sysadmin stuff,
which is accustomed to being very interrupt-driven.

For workers doing nontrivial analysis/design/programming, often
requiring flow states, my only real-world data point for *mandatory*
instant chat for top developers was that it was hated, and seemed very
counterproductive. (Eventually, the manager responsible for the hated
practice blew up in a different way.)

For workers doing nontrivial analysis/design/programming, I've seen
cases in which *optional&intermittent* instant chat was sometimes good.
But two things to be aware of:

* If you want to not lose organizational knowledge that might've
otherwise appeared in email, you will be tempted to capture all the
instant chat for the organization/project. But if you capture it, you
risk killing much of the watercooler team bonding. (Well, maybe new
college grads might not feel a chilling effect, but I bet most them
eventually will realize why they should've.)

* When the instant chat is available, it will tend to siphon off some
important knowledge/interaction that otherwise would've happened on the
email list or other non-instant modality, and might've been better there.

In general, for developers, I would usually choose to have email (and
code/docs/wiki) for important things and knowledge, and ephemeral
instant chat available for optional/intermittent watercooler bonding.
(But this doesn't apply to organizations in which you don't/shouldn't
trust your colleagues, or even much like them. Which is a lot of
dotcoms in the Bay Area convention of loyalty-free job-hopping, and
bubble IPO-hopping. I wouldn't know a good thing to advise for that
kind of organization, except for some people to hop once more, to a more
warm-fuzzy organization. :)

[Matthew Butterick]

On Feb 11, 2017, at 6:15 AM, Robby Findler <ro...@eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote:

Okay, yet another old fart who chimes in here (and look, I am top-posting! ;).

The supposed conflict between "youngs" and "olds" is an insidious one in programming. The Racket community may be smaller than some, but it's still diverse enough to include "young farts" as well as impetuous older people ;)

Software, like desert real estate, is cyclical. Boom and bust. IMO surviving one of the busts is a key experience for any programmer. This is somewhat a function of age, but also timing.

A bust makes you realize: though many claim to be building things that will last, very few of them actually do. Against that backdrop, Racket's ~20 yr longevity is extremely rare, and very impressive.

As for Discourse, I agree it looks nice. But the company behind it will very likely be gone within a couple years. Then it won't seem like much of a bargain.