[gambit-list] Contributing to Gambit

Lassi Kortela lassi at lassi.io
Thu Jan 28 05:50:01 EST 2021


In my experience it's almost universal among heavy Scheme contributors 
to feel that others are ungrateful, uncooperative, or unresponsive from 
time to time. Nowadays most of it is due to the fact that Scheme has too 
much work to do relative to manpower, so everyone is scrambling to get 
things done as best they can while figuring out what to do at the same 
time. Scheme is currently in a place where we have many promising ideas 
floating around, but no one obvious idea that most people agree is the 
most important thing to work on. That's why people are prone to go their 
own ways and find it hard to coordinate.

It also has to be said that Scheme is a magnet for people who excel at 
being creative and independent-minded, but such people are by their 
nature less predictable and less organized than most. If anyone wants 
the kind of innovative thinking and long term resilience that goes into 
Scheme, community organizing is necessarily going to be difficult. It's 
reassuring to keep in mind that we are not doing anything wrong because 
it's hard - it's an unavoidable consequence of the type of people we have.

The bright side is that creativity has never been our problem; many 
communities cannot say the same. Predictable and well-organized 
communities look good in the short term, but long term (e.g. 50-year 
timespan), the creative communities are going to be the ones that stay 
relevant.




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