Strange Loop Conference
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2018–2021
47:16 · 50K views · Oct 11, 2018
Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.
HN recommends it as an insightful look at the people side of open source maintenance, especially in Elm and maintainer-burnout threads.
9 comments from Hacker News
For those interested in hearing about Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's experiences with developing open source software and the complexities of internet social dynamics, there is an exceptional talk 'The Hard Parts of Open Source Software'. this video Regardless of whether you agree with his approach to developing a programming language, it is a talk worth listening to. Very insightful.
I enjoyed "The Hard Parts of Open Source" by Evan Czaplicki (the creator of the Elm programming language) a lot. this video It's not a talk about technology, but it's a talk on people _in_ technology. As an open source enthusiast, I found the discussion very important, especially in context where we easily tend to be distracted by technical details.
There's a great Strange Loop talk by Evan Czaplicki (of Elm fame) where he alludes to the challenges of maintaining an open source project.[1] In it he describes how feedback often starts as an innocuous "Why don't you just...?" where the person making the request doesn't have the full understanding of the system as a whole and may see their request as a simple one-off that can be done quickly. To answer them fully, the open source maintainer has to respond with a long explanation of why their suggestion isn't an option. Or, maybe they don't respond and now the original poster doesn't feel the community is supporting them. This asymmetry can lead to poor communication in the community. I've been working on an app and was reading about the pros and cons of going freemium vs. pay up-front. I was surprised to read that people suggested the pay model is better for indie devs because with free, you'll have more users, but you'll also get worse feedback from the free users. Maybe there's a correlation between seeing something as free and feeling that the work behind it is trivial? [1] this video
For me, the best thing I got from this critique was the link to this 2018 talk by Evan: The Hard Parts of Open Source, this video I found Evan's talking style really entertaining and enjoyable, and I totally relate to the first part about "why don't you just..." and "have you thought about delegation..."! The HN comments here are near uniformly negative towards Elm and supportive of Luke's criticisms. Fair enough, it's a reasoned critique and those are definitely issues that would affect users. I found the critique informative and useful. I don't use Elm though I've watched with passing interest for a while. Now I feel there are gotchas or expectations I should be aware of if I'm considering using it, about the way the project is heading. But I felt it came off way more entitled than I'm comfortable, mainly when Luke starts moralising , placing ethical obligations upon Evan. That came over to me as "you are obliged to do a lot more work that I want you to do, on your own time and personal cost, and to stop developing the project according to your own vision or you are a bad person".
"why don't you just" is called out in Evan's "The hard parts of open source" [0] talk. He goes into some of the reasons it's a bad phrase and some of the problems behind it. I'd recommend the talk. [0]: this video