The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign.
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That is to say: Firefox 1.0. 2004. A smart kid who wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition and global impact had basically four choices: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, the Apache webserver and Firefox; outside serious nerd circles that was basically it.
A decade later, after macports and later homebrew, the explosion of the ruby and python ecosystems, git and GitHub and the entire directional shift of the software world, that kid had 10,000+ choices.
@mhoye Why does it matter that the project that kid contributed to be "high profile" and have "global impact"?
Hint: it's the capitalists.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye@cosocial.ca that is damn cool to have hard confirmation for. thanks for sharing!!
was that ever publicly published? i can’t seem to find anything from Montreal, closest come https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3756681.3756994 as a 2025 dataset and its sole citation https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-15621-1_30 p. 367
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
@mhoye much earlier this year I basically gave up on an attempt to contribute to Matplotlib because the process was so painful. Like, the existing code also had issues, but that's never a big deal for me. But I would need day job money to deal with their CI setup or their patch notes process, let alone both. It's not that I couldn't soldier through it if I needed to. It's that I couldn't justify spending my life that way.
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There are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing at the bottom of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
@mhoye “… if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability…”
I’m not, but I’m starting to see the appeal
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@mhoye Why does it matter that the project that kid contributed to be "high profile" and have "global impact"?
Hint: it's the capitalists.
@jpaskaruk @mhoye Plus the lure of the glamorous conference circuit with all its free sanswiches and petty cash.
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@paulmckrcu ooh, ta. My reading comprehension/energy is sporadic these days but I will give it a go
Many years ago I heard someone attribute a quote to Rudolf Steiner about "the point of absolute materialism from which all progress will be made" - I've never managed to actually find a reference, but it does feel like it describes where we are now.
@srtcd424 Glad you like it, but as they say, be careful what you wish for. You might get it.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
On the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, a true story: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.
The feature request was "I just want this to stop."
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@mhoye I'm skeptical that "wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition" should be a goal anyone should be supporting.
That's the mindset that got us into the shit we're in: FOSS as a way to get one's foot in the door for cushy tech industry careers, not as a way to take a problem you understand and care about and make things better for yourself and others.
It promotes the same kind of behavior in FOSS as the Google "breaking shit to get a promotion".
@dalias @mhoye I can second that from the contributor side (in my younger days). It meant I ended up with less team loyalty, less systemic knowledge, and a lot of (internal) inappropriate reactions to setbacks and obstacles. It also led me to make some bad choices of projects to contribute to, not in the sense of the project being objectively bad, just not a good fit for me. None of that applied to the work I did for the right reasons.
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We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
I violently agree.
Even in a closed shop environment, the money/time/effort (which ware all equivalent) you invest in on-boarding new contributors, streamlining the path to their first commit and accolades for following established processes by _following the documentation_ pays huge dividends that vastly outweigh the cost in maintaining all that stuff.
When I ran things around here, the record for a new just-graduated CS kid to his first ready-to-code-review bugfix PR was _a day_. He read the onboarding material, setup all the repositories and toolchains, self-served from the architecture and "welcome to the shitshow that is our main code repository, read this first to figure your way around" on day 1 and picked, fixed and auto-tested a bug by 10am the next day.
In his case the motivation was "I want a raise, eventually". In open source, people show up on your doorstep wanting to... begging to help. Make the experience easy and memorable and they'll stick around.
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On the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, a true story: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.
The feature request was "I just want this to stop."
The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
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On the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, a true story: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.
The feature request was "I just want this to stop."
@mhoye sounds like a really shitty place to work if that behaviour was expected. was this via a public irc server or internal only?
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To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
@mhoye Oh man. I used to be Perl-fluent back in the day. I vastly prefer Python. I’m retired now and I keep trying to convince myself to learn a new language. I was thinking French but I might expand the definition to include Ruby. 🤭
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@mhoye While I think the Perl metaphor is very selectively remembering history and over-estimating the importance of languages, I don't entirely disagree with the conclusions about Linux.
But it won't matter a bit. Sure, this means you get fewer volunteers. But beyond "cult" and "community" you're missing the fourth C of Linux - corporations. There's already plenty of paid developers, and if those aren't elevated community members anymore but regular code-doulas-for-hire from the start, it's probably going to be enough for quite a while.
I think it's bang on.
Perl drove me up the wall, but it was the thing you did unix admin with.
Then config management tools happened, and they were both Ruby (yes I know, ansible. ugh) and our entire team cheerfully binned the perl junk and used a real language instead.
Perl made me feel stupid. Ruby allowed me to remember that I'd been a coder and had fun with it.
(modulo some truly hairy MIME-handling that only perl could cope with)
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Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
@mhoye, incidentally, I was listening to a radio programme which, this week, happened to be discussing farming and the effects of climate change. There was mention of how the older people resist change and the younger ones accept it, regarding farming methods and which crops or animals do better and how these things are changing.
I'm seeing… certain similarities here; and once again, I'm reminded of how we tend to go from ”this is how it is” to “new shiny! must examine!” to “new stuff? who needs it…”
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The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
Like, OK, we've got clean running water now, we've got soap, we've got [checks notes] the forum management equivalent of an orbital ion cannon for dealing with the abuse or harassment of our community in our open forums., and I guess we're on our way to penicillin. We're going to be OK.
Being trusted to provide the foundations and tooling of that psychological safety to a team of the finest people I have ever worked with, and delivering on that promise, has been the high point of my career.
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@mhoye I am not a kernel contributor, yet, but I am currently in the middle of a massive personal push to get on top of C (which I consider a naively honest language, now that I'm learning about it in earnest) because mainly I'm tired of not being able to write my own device drivers, but other reasons too.
It's been difficult but I found a way to keep this going and track progress in a way that is not at the mercy of me not losing or misplacing a notebook. And basically, I'm doing it the ultra-hard way, studying the underlying math as math before I inevitably encounter it used in code - I dropped out of school, but grasping concepts was never the issue - and basically just acquiring this new mental toolset so I can have more agency in what I do with my computers.
Everyone, especially the capitalists, knew that others would just "hey I want this thing you handle the hard stuff" because we live in a world of opportunistic Idea Men who think their inherent genius makes them worthy of skipping the actual doing. That they were allowed to do this is obscene, of course.
Side effect, it's so much fun. And if anything ever felt like I was learning Deep Magic, this is it - you learn hacks as a fundamental exercise, because they save you cycles, and this stuff runs at the speed of god. C still has some genuine awe to offer in the results it can give you.
Now, I can see also the tedium in implementing things from this level of scratch, so I can see why experienced devs would want to pass off "write me a function that takes int x, char y, structedtype gerble, applies these operations, and returns whatever," and then look said fairly generic but also specific function over, rather than doing the tedious housekeeping all day.
I have a few GUI projects that will come in time, which I will probably do only the core functionality (DSP, 3D mesh operations, etc) in C, while implementing the UI in something easier and higher-level that only needs to run at human speed.
But if by that point I have a local inference model that can do that level of simple C code for me, hand off a function declaration with a comment that describes it, and thus I can implement everything in straight C, except with the tedium removed, I can't say I won't use it.
Fuck the datacentres, but this shit works, especially for code, and I don't think I need a datacentre for that, even with my crappy old 1070. Saying this is wrong is like saying we should do 3D animation exactly the same way they made the Money For Nothing video. It's a tool that automates complex operations quite reliably, in the hands of a discerning expert. Nobody opens Blender for the first time and makes anything more complex than a donut on their first day.
But any use of actual code generation would be long after I've finished learning how to understand Assembly, as well as finally getting my head wrapped thoroughly around how you write good, fast C code, along with all the mathymaths I will need to understand in order to do the things I want the apps to do. None of it is magic or a secret, it's just a lot of time spent getting the concepts into your head and building the muscle memory, like I did when I learned piano, and by necessity, music theory - you just put in the time and do the exercises, be they scales or math problems.
I'm happy that I've preserved enough of my brain that I can enjoy this now, and I mean, people who just don't want to learn are always going to be annoying, but at the moment they are enabled by the fact that technology is not run by technologists, it's run by rich manbabies exclusively.
The problem is the capitalists. The problem has always been the capitalists. Deal with them and everyone will be free to study Calculus for fun, and bring back the joy in computers.
@jpaskaruk @mhoye Have you looked at Zig? The tag line is basically "C with proper tooling"
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@mhoye sounds like a really shitty place to work if that behaviour was expected. was this via a public irc server or internal only?
@waffles The combination of the long running and deep seated cultural expectation of working in the open, the fact that for many years IRC was the only suitable tool for that and that later alternatives were almost all proprietary or otherwise closed meant we held onto it for very good, values-forward reasons, for a lot longer than we should have.
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@mhoye heh. Perl syntax never bothered me, and I still probably think about most programming problems as Perl problems, even if I'm using another language. This occasionally bumps me up against the ways other languages aren't as capable, flexible, or dwimmy as Perl, but I also have to be real about the fact that the gum I like just isn't coming back in style.
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The move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
@mhoye Is there an inventory of the capabilities you & yrs found particularly valuable somewhere?
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@mhoye also I think almost everybody who regularly came to DC Perlmongers meetings in the day has moved on to other languages (if they're still programming at all), so it seems unlikely that even the olds who used to use Perl first would still make that choice.
@fedward @mhoye I'm an old who did a lot with Perl from 5.005 (SunOS
until, well, last week anyhow.I *also* use python. Perl was (and still is) my favorite tool that's absolutely everywhere.
Of the 20-odd languages I've used in the last 40 years, it's still #1 for quick in-place recursive file edits. My workplace is more sed/awk, but if you think perl is ugly...
