5 years ago I was upset and posted a comment that was unfairly harsh to another commenter. I apologized at the time, and I meant it. I definitely should not have made the harsh comment that I did. It was wrong. There's no excuse for my having written it.

There are a lot of people working on Roc other than me. I'm not even the top committer anymore. [0] I hope you can find it in your heart to give their work some consideration, if not mine.

[0] https://github.com/roc-lang/roc/graphs/contributors

As a manager, I empathize with the frustration you were feeling. Steering a team or a community towards a vision is very hard. Just when you think you’re getting somewhere, someone does the exact opposite and mixes people up. It’s easy to lose patience. I’ve made similar mistakes on popular projects and was fortunate enough that no one publicized them. I was allowed to learn from my mistakes without being punished for it.

I don’t have any advice on this. It’ll probably turn out fine.

> Threatening a person with exclusion from a community for attempting to patch the source code is quite antithetical to the spirit of Open Source, as far as I can see.

Note that they were never prevented from forking the project (how would you even do that), instead they chose to try and stronghand the project into accepting their view, which is also not healthy for OSS. Maybe their Elm fork would be mainstream by now if it really catered to developers’ needs.

It's always the same story, too. Someone felt personally wronged by something actually quite minor like their their PR getting ignored/rejected with perhaps a tone too snappy for them, and now they have a personal vendetta until the end of time with no rock nor HN comment section left unturned from them lingering in the past.

Sometimes you need to leave the theater and let the rest of us enjoy the show.

Hopefully a mod sinks this entire thread so we can read interesting thoughts about Roc.

Seems like the Author of Roc is cool now, that was 5 years ago and hasn't done the thing you fear he might do? people get testy, say things they regret.

I understand trust is earned, but it's been 5 years. and the Roc community thus far have been really nice, welcoming and collaborative. I get Elixir and Ruby community vibes from these contributors.

Pick your battles I guess?

Roc isn't Elm. RF is one person in that community, and he said something he regretted 5 years ago and has since not repeated that mistake.

Do you know the moral dealings of every developer of every piece of technology you use?

When it comes to Roc and It's community..ask yourself.

    “Am I sure that what I am going to say is true?” 
    “Is what I'm going to say a good thing?”, 
    and “Do I really need to say it and is it useful?”

> When it comes to Roc and It's community..ask yourself.

Sorry, but this kind of faux niceness is precisely what stopped people from asking about issues, as it was always argued that asking about such issues was not "useful," after some time. So yes, I do feel the need to bring up this topic if only for others to evaluate the creators themselves rather than only have "good" things to say that "really need" to be said.

Elm also seemed very promising in the beginning, and honestly I don't even think that comment is so abhorrent on its own. I think Elm died the death of a thousand cuts. If it had only been one errant comment somewhere, it would've been mostly forgotten about by now. Instead, it's Elm that's mostly forgotten about.

So I say best of luck, but also... No thanks for now.

edit: Just so it's completely clear, I am actually implying that "maintainers being dicks" was actually not the problem with Elm. I think people just got especially infuriated by it because they were sick of trying to deal with Elm's constant direction changes, of which this represented one. I remember going through and learning Elm and like literally months later everything was completely different and I no longer knew how to make a basic hello world application. I know that to some degree this is the nature of a 0.x product, but at some point it's like "OK... then who is supposed to even use this?"

Imagine me not using Linux because of Linus being harsh (yet educative) to some people... or not using OpenBSD because of Theo... or not using Common Lisp because of #lisp... :P I have received some hostile feedback personally, but they were in the right. I did not take it to heart but I learned from it.

That said, I have checked the edit history and I cannot see what the fuss is about. Welp. Moving on.

Forget about all of the drama, imagine if you used Linux and it stopped updating at 2.6. Elm has been at 0.19 since 2018, and that's not because there's nothing left to improve on.

Yup, that definitely would be an issue.

> EDIT 5 years later: You can see in the edit history of this comment what I originally wrote here; I was upset and said unkind things that I regret, and which nobody deserved to hear. I apologized at the time and I still feel I should apologize again, unequivocally. I was in the wrong here.

I don't understand why people have to make technical stuff personal.

Seriously, tho, that's the comment that "made the Elm community a hostile and unwelcoming place" and is still being dredged up after 5 years? That comment can barely even be considered harsh, and is nowhere near hostile.

Is it really worth tearing down someone's life, monitoring the internet for any time their name appears, just so you can spread the continue to spread the hate toward him after so long? This is where you make your stand?