Why I no longer contribute to Racket

Re:Why I no longer contribute to Racket by parenwielder on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @04:01PM (#27532819)

This is absolutely the key point, and the one that all the discussion here is missing. Nobody defends Matthias' behavior, they just suggest that you should tolerate or ignore it. The reason is clear when you realize that "the Racket community" is more-or-less analogous with "Matthias' academic descendants." The people who are working on Racket as a language owe immense professional debts to Matthias.

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Re:Why I no longer contribute to Racket by DonaldPShimoda on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @05:07PM (#27533480)

> "the Racket community" is more-or-less analogous with "Matthias' academic descendants."

For people who don't know, the Racket project was started by Matthias Felleisen in the early '90s. The next people on the project were all his PhD students:

- Matthew Flatt

- Robby Findler

- Shriram Krishnamurthi

- Cormac Flanagan

Later additions who are top contributors to github.com/racket/racket:

- Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Felleisen's student)

- Jay McCarthy (Krishnamurthi's student)

- Vincent St-Amour (Felleisen's student)

- Ryan Culpepper (Felleisen's student)

- Asumu Takikawa (Felleisen's student)

- Eric Dobson (Krishnamurthi's undergraduate student)

In the top 10 contributors listed on GitHub, only 2 are not academic descendants of Felleisen:

- Eli Barzilay

- Matthias Felleisen

EDIT: I originally listed Eric Dobson as "not an academic descendant of Felleisen" because I hadn't been able to find information on a dissertation or the like, but a comment informed me that they were an undergraduate student of Krishnamurthi so I have updated the comment to reflect this.

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Re:Why I no longer contribute to Racket by bhickey on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @06:05PM (#27533981)

> In the top 10 contributors listed on GitHub, only 3 are not academic descendants of Felleisen:

Eric Dobson and I were undergrads studying under Shriram. I don't contribute to Racket, but it has nothing to do with Felleisen being an asshole.

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Re:Why I no longer contribute to Racket by DonaldPShimoda on Wednesday June 16, 2021 @06:27PM (#27534186)

Ah, apologies for the misinformation. I had tried to find information on Dobson's academic background and came up blank, so I assumed they weren't in academia (and, thus, no direct connection to Felleisen). Thank you for the correction!

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Re:Why I no longer contribute to Racket by parenwielder on Thursday June 17, 2021 @01:08AM (#27536293)

And the last remaining not-Matthias person on your list, while not an academic descendent of his, (to the best of my knowledge) owes their current employment to Matthias' politicking.

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Re:Why I no longer contribute to Racket by ashtonkem on Thursday June 17, 2021 @06:34PM (#27545196)

Codes of conduct are good for more nuanced cases; if you’ve got behavior that would fall under a very generic “don’t be an asshole” type rule, the problem you’ve got is an enforcement issue not a documenation issue.

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