Multiple mailing lists

[Jamison Hope]

On Jul 2, 2012, at 9:11 AM, Charles Turner wrote:

> On 2 July 2012 13:59, Bruce Lewis <blewis@eatonvance.com> wrote:
>> There is plenty of evidence that certain Scheme advocates don't get  
>> along with certain Common Lisp advocates.  However, it's difficult  
>> to measure how well "communities" get along, because those who do  
>> get along don't make as much noise.
>
> I haven't received any death threats for working on CL so far, so I'm
> not sure how specific this point is. It is clear that most of the
> people on this list are here for Kawa's Scheme implementation. So
> maybe the hypothetical "users" list could represent that mass, and we
> could have a separate "fringe" list for all the other languages in
> Kawa. The "dev" list wouldn't need to be so discriminating, as I'd
> posit most of the developers here are interested in the development of
> all the languages, not just Scheme.

I'm mostly staying out of this discussion, but I offer the following
points.

Re one list vs. several:

- By having a single list, all subscribers are exposed to all traffic;
   clearly this is not everyone's preference, so multiple lists would  
be a
   Good Thing.
- OTOH having multiple lists increases the possibility that you'll miss
   a message that you'd want -- maybe because you didn't subscribe to  
one
   of the lists thinking it wouldn't interest you, or maybe because
   somebody sent the message to the wrong list (which happens ALL THE  
TIME).
- So the ideal is probably N lists, for some *small* N > 1. Your
   suggestion for the conventional announce/users/dev trio sounds about
   right.

Re (supposed or real) inter-language hostility and language-specific
lists:

- It says right on the tin that Kawa is a multi-language framework, so
   I doubt many Kawa users are the hard-core dogmatic "My Lisp Is Great,
   Yours Is Stupid" types; those people are more likely to stick to a
   project that's only implementing the one they like. [Side note: are
   there any other projects striving to implement both Scheme and Common
   Lisp? Guile does ELisp, which is close, but are there others?]

- Apart from special occasions like GSOC, list traffic is typically
   going to be roughly proportional to the popularity of the language
   being discussed. So, the Scheme users typically won't have to put
   up with too much CL or ELisp or BRL -- hi, Bruce! -- traffic even if
   they stay on the same list. (The converse is that the smug CL weenies
   are stuck wading through gobs of Scheme nonsense.)

- Exposure to multiple languages makes you a better programmer, so
   keeping all non-Scheme traffic off of the main list is doing the
   Schemers a disservice (and likewise for Lispers and Scheme traffic).
   I'm only partially kidding.


-Jamie

--
Jamison Hope
The PTR Group
www.theptrgroup.com