[Haskell-cafe] Maintaining the community

[Andrea Rossato]

On Sun, Jul 15, 2007 at 09:56:46PM +0800, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> One of the frustrating things about seeing this happen over and over
> again is the insistence of people that "this community is somehow
> different".  It isn't.  People are people and politics is politics.
> It's all the same manure on a different pile.

You are right.

Still, I noted that usually newcomers tend to form perturbing
coalitions led by some intermediate users who are trying their way up.
That may not succeed but usually creates the conditions for some
change. Or just a continuous noise. Or even the collapse of the
community.

My personal perception, and I could be factually wrong for the second
time, is that here something like that is not happening at all. And I
think this is related to the nature of the Haskell programming and the
perception of its being difficult and intellectually demanding.

That is to say, there seems to be a surplus of deference that is
hurting the leadership, even more than the newcomers.

This resembles me the _style_, as you noted, of the academia, where
the problem is far from being brute power.

Once I was sitting in front of this great Yale super professor (I'm a
lawyer), together with my two mentors ("maestri" as we call them - the
guys that, you know, should bring you to the tenure..;-). Now, the
Yale guy, after some glasses of red wine, started talking about the
concept of time in Nietzsche's philosophy. He was just talking
bullshit about something he didn't know, and I was a young ph.d
student who happened to have read almost all Nietzsche's works, a
passion of mine at the time. My mentors knew it too, still they were
just nodding ... and drinking, and dreaming. I sat there listening
silently.

All the best.
Andrea

(Now I have a new mentor and still no tenure (so many years have elapsed).
So I must confess I have this tendency to being wrong.)