Comment by noir_lord

Comment by noir_lord 4 hours ago

> You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not.

The big open source projects where pretty much all like that in the past, in the 80's/90's/early 2000's - in that respect they feel like a pleasant anachronism before everything needed to be promoted/self-promotional influencer like, the users did the evangelism but the creators where usually much more chill.

Obviously the vast majority of open source projects are still like that but there is definitely a lot more in your face promotion of things that feels different somehow almost aggressive/corporate style even when there is no paid product.

Not knocking the ones who do it, if it's open source they can sing it from a mountain top for all I care, the license it's under matters more.

isodev 3 hours ago

I think what has changed mainly is that today we have tools, languages and entire ecosystems that exist only as means to support someone’s product line.

Take Swift for example. A giant gatekeeper of a corp decided to make it the only (reasonable) way to build apps and so it exists, powered by countless indie developers constantly creating content around it. Would Swift be a thing without everyone being forced to use it? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

So in some ways we’ve traded unique and effective solutions to “popular and mainstream” things that scream the loudest. You wouldn’t get fired for choosing Swift. Or Azure.

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Cthulhu_ an hour ago

When I was working with it (I was there, 4000 years ago) there was some talk about Swift for the server, but neither obj-C nor Swift ever really breached containment of the Apple ecosystem and -tooling. Which is a shame because at the time I enjoyed working in XCode. Who knew using a mouse swipe to go back in your code would be so natural? Not any other IDE developer, ever.
Last time I worked with it it felt very sluggish and buggy though, in theory building UI elements with SwiftUI is great, in practice it was slow and needed to restart very often, and that was with simple components.

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- skydhash an hour ago
  
  That is why I don’t like those ecosystems. They’re all relying on magic (code generation and indexing) for everything instead of just providing a good notation.
  If you’re creating that closed of an ecosystem, at least learn from history and create something like smalltalk.
  
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kace91 3 hours ago

>somehow almost aggressive/corporate style even when there is no paid product.

For those who collaborate with open source for political/ideological reasons (which does not need be the case), it makes sense to join the battle for attention.

As long as the product isn’t compromised in the way, I think it’s very good to see open source influencers.

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pxc 2 hours ago

GNU Guix has a good blog, but I don't feel like they are very "marketing" focused.
It's hard to describe precisely, but a lot of free software projects do a good job of putting themselves out there in an unfussy way. There really is something refreshing and cozy about that.

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- keeganpoppen 3 minutes ago
  
  i think this is especially true of projects run by people with deep experience in the field and are in it “for the love of the game”, and don’t feel the need to stunt on everyone in hopes that they are taken seriously.
  
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actionfromafar 4 hours ago

I think it's because we are wired that attention is it's own currency nowadays. And it's also true. Even if there's no paid product, you get strength in numbers. If you depend on an open source library, it's usually better for you if others depend on it too.

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noir_lord 4 hours ago

Certainly an element of that but there are also cases where the superior product "lost" to the inferior product because the inferior one was better marketed.
So doing some level of promotion becomes necessary if you want users even when you have the better product - the superior product speaks for itself doesn't often apply any more.

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- marcosdumay 2 hours ago
  
  > doesn't often apply any more
  It actually never did, for almost any product.
  And programming languages are in the lower end of quality actually impacting decisions. People are incredibly resistant to changes there, and just can't evaluate competing options at the same time.
  
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