In this case, we are discussing the leadership of a community project; the leaders are the ones who set policy for the project. In this sense, yeah, it's a political situation.

Given your username, I'm a little surprised that you wouldn't recognize that the leaders of community projects are politically important...

I have a self-imposed limit of 4 hrs/day of productive code-writing; beyond that, quality drops too much to be sustainable. There's plenty of things to do during a workday, of course; salaried days deserve 8 hrs/day, and I've been on on-call rotations that require 12 hrs/day of presence.

Don't use OpenAI's outdated tools. Also, don't rely on prompt engineering to force the output to conform. Instead, use a local LLM and something like jsonformer or parserllm which can provably output well-formed/parseable text.

PLDI is political; in general, any sort of language-design process is political. This is because language is expressive and also constraining, so the expressible and easy-to-express concepts in any language are its de facto default policies.

Social conservatives tend to produce languages which are patrician and sadistic in their demands upon their users; C and Go, D, Hoon and Nock, Hare, and V all come to mind. They see these languages as offering "choice" and power to the end-user, and see languages which have redundant structures and safety, like Ada or Pascal, as "bondage & discipline".

You're likely familiar with the frustration of using designed-by-committee languages, too; say, C++ or Python. These systems tend to evolve social conservatism as a way of preventing an explosion of features, as happened to Perl and is happening to Rust.

Hopefully this is good food for thought. Your choice of language is not politically neutral, but occurs within a social context and has policy implications. Work at a PHP shop for a few years and you'll suddenly care quite a bit about which languages you use!

Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions; like many social conservatives these days, he likes to complain about wokeness and communism, and I would completely understand a community fork simply to remove his control over various parts of the D language.

Also, just for a quick sanity-check: Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that "political stunts" had a "negative impact" on your planned development?

It must be nice to have never productionized a prototype; meanwhile, in the land of startups, putting experiments into production is standard operating procedure, despite being a bad idea.

The more important part is that flakes are unstable. The concept is solid and clearly works at scale, but the precise API available to users is not yet finalized or versioned.

I was actually a music major! Software engineering is my backup career, but back then, it was my dayjob; I wrote code for the university during the day, and played music at local clubs at night.

Yes. However, such positions are not common, because they rely on a pre-allocated pile of money being dedicated towards FLOSS.

When I was at Oregon State University, I worked for the Open Source Lab; you may recognize them as an option on your distro's mirror list. During part of that time, I worked for the Open Source Education Lab, an outreach program which was funded by a grant through the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (now the College of Electrical & Computer Engineering). This grant funded some get-togethers on campus, the local Linux Users Group, and some one-off interactions like giving talks to undergraduate classes about how to use FLOSS software.

But, when the grant ended, so did OSEL. OSL and the LUG are still around because their funding comes from OSL tenants and LUG club members respectively, but they are not focused on outreach and advocacy.

It's a little surprising to see Conda mentioned but not Nix.

In the Nix ecosystem, I appreciate Cachix quite a bit. It's much easier than running a Hydra.

Conway's Law is a category-theoretic statement; it asserts the existence of a homomorphism on graphs, mapping from modules to code authors. Quoting Conway's original paper:

Speaking as a mathematician might, we would say that there is a homomorphism from the linear graph of a system to the linear graph of its design organization.

The author does not really show an understanding or respect for the underlying maths.