Maintainers needed

[Faré]

Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL
projects, as I myself may do soon:
Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor
Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.

Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some
even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest
ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the
future.

Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.

Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and
give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting
fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals
should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be
a good home.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania.
Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness.
Homomania, islamomania, etc.

[Burton Samograd]

What do you think are the most high priority projects that require maintaining?

--
Burton

Post by Faré
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL
Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans Hübner, David Lichteblau, Gabor
Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some
even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest
ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the
future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and
give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting
fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals
should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be
a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania.
Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness.
Homomania, islamomania, etc.

[Faré]

This post might be inappropriate. Click to display it.

[Elliott Johnson]

Post by Faré
As for me, I'm jumping ship to Gerbil Scheme (cons.io) — but I just
want to leave the place tidy and in good hands as I leave CL behind.

Faré,

It's been about 10 years since we met up in "old" Oakland and it was a
lot of fun to hear about the high level lisp work at ITA. I wish you
the best in writing software, doing the things you love, and hope that
from time to time you can check back in with old projects and friends.

Regards,
Elliott

[Vsevolod Dyomkin]

Post by Faré
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL
Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans HÃŒbner, David Lichteblau, Gabor
Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.

Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) persons
on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As
you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but
continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work
given the stability of most of their important projects that the community
relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are
already taken care of by sharplispers.

Post by Faré
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some
even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest
ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the
future.

It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the
scale of the issue.

Post by Faré
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and
give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting
fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals
should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be
a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics•
http://fare.tunes.org
If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania.
Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness.
Homomania, islamomania, etc.

[Faré]

Post by Vsevolod Dyomkin

Post by Faré
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL

Is there a confirmation from all of the listed (and also unlisted) persons
on the fact that they have stopped maintaining their stuff altogether? As
you say below, there are a number of people who are not very active, but
continue accepting occasional patches - that's, actually, very little work
given the stability of most of their important projects that the community
relies upon. I know about Nathan, and the majority of his projects are
already taken care of by sharplispers.

At least Edi Weitz, Hans Huebner, Nathan Froyd have made it official
(and soon me).
Gabor Melis, Nikodemus Siivola — maybe it's just me they've been
ignoring me for months on github, by mail and on twitter; maybe they
still think they'll get back to Lisp some day; in the meantime their
software has bitrotted on Quicklisp.
David Lichteblau, Cyrus Harmon, Henrik Hjelte, Andreas Fuchs, Kevin
Rosenberg, Samium Gromoff — I believe at least some of them have made
it official.
There are many more authors who have quit whose name doesn't come to
me at this point, but that you'll identify as you skim the list of
packages of Quicklisp.
And there are just orphan packages, untouched in years.

And sometimes abandoned packages still work great, or are unused
anyway, so that's fine. Software lives, software dies. Sometimes
peacefully, sometimes in a fire.

However, consider that if you migrate to Sharplispers too eagerly, you
may waste time; but if you wait for the bitrot to set in before you
fork any given library, you won't see the PRs piling before the
project is in such disarray that three people reimplement from scratch
libraries that each do the 20% they need, further balkanizing the
community.

I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordination
on library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of the
reason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going to
happen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be done
on top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for some
kinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each his
own.

Post by Vsevolod Dyomkin
It would be great to see a list of those projects to be able to assess the
scale of the issue.

Not my job anymore. I would just rather pass the baton as I leave than
drop it on the floor. But I'll drop it if no one takes it.

I used to chase after authors whose systems I broke as I evolved ASDF
and it didn't support their abuse of ASDF internals or use of
deprecated ASDF functionality, and so I noticed a lot of things (and
remained blind to others of course). If anyone after me decides to
keep improving ASDF (rather than merely keep it running as is), he'll
notice as much.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Suggesting I hate people with religion because I hate religion is like
suggesting I hate people with cancer because I hate cancer. — Ricky Gervais

[Alexandre Rademaker]

It would be interesting to see a serious study about how such coordination happens in other ecosystems. In some cases, it looks like the environment impose the coordination somehow (ex: R). In cases like Python, despite the messy proliferation of libraries with redundant functionalities, people seen to be happy (or ignorant about the problems). Haskell is trying to address version dependencies, but it looks still complicated to understand the options available. Anyway, for me, it is a social issue more than a technical one.

But from time to time we see a significant transformation, I believe we all agree about the huge impact of Quicklisp!

Best,

--
Alexandre Rademaker
http://arademaker.github.io <http://arademaker.github.io/>
http://researcher.ibm.com/person/br-alexrad <http://researcher.ibm.com/person/br-alexrad>

Post by Faré
I believe CL could benefit a lot from a little bit more coordination
on library development and maintenance. But obviously, part of the
reason I'm jumping ship is that I don't believe this is going to
happen (the other part is my wanting to do things that can't be done
on top of CL-provided abstractions). The activation energy for some
kinds of interactions is too high in CL. And that's fine, to each his
own.

[Faré]

Post by Alexandre Rademaker
It would be interesting to see a serious study about how such coordination
happens in other ecosystems.

I just saw a tweet by someone thanking the PHP community for how it welcome
him to programming, etc., promptly followed by many metoo's. PHP the
language may suck, badly, but apparently, the community has something to
teach us.

I believe an important feature for a language is low overhead to starting
to program. Between files, packages, modules and systems, classes and
structures, portability issues, etc., CL requires a lot of overhead just to
get into it. This creates a barrier to entry. Attempts to simplify like
quick-build or asdf-inferred-system only help so much when a lot of
complexity is inherent to the copious standard or lack thereof (depending
on the topic). Quicklisp tremendously lowered the barrier to reusing other
people's code, but didn't by itself change the culture, document the code,
or consolidate divergent efforts. Lispers remain by and large
individualists who don't program in large herds and don't know how to.

Post by Alexandre Rademaker
In some cases, it looks like the environment
impose the coordination somehow (ex: R). In cases like Python, despite the
messy proliferation of libraries with redundant functionalities, people

seen

Post by Alexandre Rademaker
to be happy (or ignorant about the problems). Haskell is trying to address
version dependencies, but it looks still complicated to understand the
options available. Anyway, for me, it is a social issue more than a
technical one.

Social and technical are very much linked. See for instance the essay that
got me started with ASDF: https://fare.livejournal.com/149264.html — by
implementing the technical feature that ASDF could upgrade itself, the
social incentives switched for all players from "upgrading ASDF is socially
toxic" to "not upgrading ASDF is socially slightly detrimental".

Some of the overhead of CL is builtin the language and its ecosystem and
too costly to remove (see above). Some of the barriers to entry can be
adressed: writing tutorials, curating and documenting libraries, providing
easily documented and easily found solutions to common problems, and
cheaper bridges to other ecosystems, etc.

It's a lot of work, but it's also about having a technical kernel suitable
to foster cooperation.

Post by Alexandre Rademaker
But from time to time we see a significant transformation, I believe we

all

Post by Alexandre Rademaker
agree about the huge impact of Quicklisp!

Yes, Xach single-handedly solved a great number of problems for all CL
hackers, where many others tried and failed after burning out. He deserves
a lot of praises.

-#f

[Jason Cornez]

Hello Faré,

Thanks for this. I'd be interested in joining sharplispers. Does anyone know the process for that?

I'm willing and likely capable of helping, but I don't have time to actively find a project to adopt. So a more central place for issues to be handled, regardless of project, is attractive.

Maybe this could be a topic at the 2018 ELS in Marbella?

-Jason

Post by Faré
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL
Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans HÃŒbner, David Lichteblau, Gabor
Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some
even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest
ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the
future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and
give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting
fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals
should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be
a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania.
Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness.
Homomania, islamomania, etc.

[Faré]

Post by Jason Cornez
Thanks for this. I'd be interested in joining sharplispers. Does anyone
know the process for that?

Ask Xach or Luis or some other administrator of sharplispers.

Post by Jason Cornez
I'm willing and likely capable of helping, but I don't have time to actively
find a project to adopt. So a more central place for issues to be handled,
regardless of project, is attractive.

A lot of projects only require light maintenance and a common pool of
maintainers make a lot of sense for them.

Post by Jason Cornez
Maybe this could be a topic at the 2018 ELS in Marbella?

Only if you find a sucker^Wvolunteer. Every year there's a new kid in
the block who wants to curate CL libraries. So far, Xach is an
exception in actually doing it and sticking to it year after year.
Make Lispers cooperate is hard. Something about herding cats. Weak
coordination models work best in this context, otherwise you'll burn
out. My 2010 paper on ASDF had the subtitle "More Cooperation, Less
Coordination".

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Those "organizers" who confuse coordination and cooperation will have
100% coordination for 0% cooperation. All costs, no benefits.

[Luís Oliveira]

Hey Jason,

You're quite welcome to jump in straight away and review pending pull
requests or issues.

I think that's the hardest part of maintenance, reviewing submissions that
don't scratch any of one's own itches. (With the sharplispers projects,
there's the additional challenge of dealing with unfamiliar codebases.)

If you'd like to adopt a new project, you can send a message to
***@googlegroups.com. In the group's archives you will also find a
fun proposal by Nikodemus to import projects from the CMU AI repository.

Cheers,
Luís

Post by Jason Cornez
Hello Faré,
Thanks for this. I'd be interested in joining sharplispers. Does anyone
know the process for that?
I'm willing and likely capable of helping, but I don't have time to
actively find a project to adopt. So a more central place for issues to be
handled, regardless of project, is attractive.
Maybe this could be a topic at the 2018 ELS in Marbella?
-Jason
Many prominent CL developers have stopped maintaining their CL
Nathan Froyd, Henrik Hjelte, Hans HÃŒbner, David Lichteblau, Gabor
Melis, Nikodemus Siivola, etc.
Some of their projects have lots of unanswered PRs on github an some
even break when compiled with a recent Quicklisp and/or the newest
ASDF. Many don't break yet, but issue warnings and may break in the
future.
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.
Since I'm jumping ship, I won't be the one to fork these projects and
give them a new home (though I'm available to do it, for my consulting
fee, if there's enough of a market). Some of you CL professionals
should do it and/or fund it. https://github.com/sharplispers might be
a good home.
—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics•
http://fare.tunes.org
If being against something is a phobia, then being for is mania.
Peace and understanding through slurs of mental illness.
Homomania, islamomania, etc.

[gwking - metabang]

Post by Faré
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.

I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).

[Steve Haflich]

Gary --
Don't be discouraged, and don't stop trying. Lisp has a long learning
curve...

Post by Faré
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.

I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).

[Michael Fiano]

Fare, thank you for your contributions. Ever since your "jumping ship"
article earlier this year, I too have considered doing the same. I have
been mostly silently listening to your reasoning, but all of it hit home
with me as well. While I haven't been using CL for very long -- a decade --
I believe the time has also come for myself to take what I have learned and
switch my focus elsewhere. Good luck in your goals with Gerbil, and thank
you for your contributions and giving me a lot to think about this past
year.

Post by Steve Haflich
Gary --
Don't be discouraged, and don't stop trying. Lisp has a long learning
curve...

Post by Faré
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.

I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).

[Ken Tilton]

Thank goodness. We could use some peace and quiet in this graveyard.

So to what has everyone switched? Javascript? Clojure? Go? Gardening?

-hk

Post by Michael Fiano
Fare, thank you for your contributions. Ever since your "jumping ship"
article earlier this year, I too have considered doing the same. I have
been mostly silently listening to your reasoning, but all of it hit home
with me as well. While I haven't been using CL for very long -- a decade --
I believe the time has also come for myself to take what I have learned and
switch my focus elsewhere. Good luck in your goals with Gerbil, and thank
you for your contributions and giving me a lot to think about this past
year.

Post by Steve Haflich
Gary --
Don't be discouraged, and don't stop trying. Lisp has a long learning
curve...

Post by Faré
Some old farts like Gary King or I only do minimal maintenance of our
own projects, and we're mortal — I'm considering quitting even that
maintenance.

I may be a fart and I may be old but I’m not an old fart :-).

[Faré]

Post by Ken Tilton
Thank goodness. We could use some peace and quiet in this graveyard.
So to what has everyone switched? Javascript? Clojure? Go? Gardening?

Last I heard,
Andreas Fuchs joined a Ruby shop.
Hans Huebner embraced Clojure.
Gabor Melis joined a Java/C++/Go/Python shop.
Peter Seibel joined a Python shop.
I (FR Rideau) adopted Gerbil Scheme.
Edi Weitz is teaching, though probably still using CL.

I don't know what languages other former active CL community members
have adopted, if any. If you're interested in conducting short
interviews, I'm interested in reading the results. But not interested
enough to conduct the interviews myself.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
— Samuel Goldwyn