Item — HN Reader

> as I don't think the submitted article is hostile at all

Tone is lost in text and I don't have much background. If I was thinking of contributing to Clojure, this post is reason enough to stay away from it.

Based on your explanation, I think Hickey should have simply ignored the user's post and let that be the end of it. I mentioned "blunt" response to individual contributions. That is quite different to a blanket statement with a "we don't owe you s... - f... off if you don't like it" vibe.

2 comments

> If I was thinking of contributing to Clojure, this post is reason enough to stay away from it.

Without wanting to sound flippant or rude, I think they'd be cool with that. They're talking about contributions to the core language here. Not fixing typos in a README.

In mature projects like this, all the low-hanging fruit is done. You can't just take a notion some weekend and fire off a useful pull request. It requires an investment. To make a good contribution to Clojure you have to....

  - clearly define the problem that needs to be solved
  - get other people on the core team to agree that it needs to be solved
  - document a number of ways to solve it, discuss with the community which one will work best
  - let these ideas stew for a while, people might change their minds

The above constitutes 95% of the work and would typically take months rather than days. Once all that's done, coding up the implementation is the easy bit.

> Not fixing typos in a README.

That's a detail that, even if specifically was mentioned, would be overshadowed by the main sentiment.

The blanket statement is correct, though. It may not be couched in a palatable way, but only in that it doesn't spend lots of words on how lovely everyone is and how few people it is addressing. It just says what's true and leaves it at that. If you'd rather not work in that environment then that's reasonable, but I think it's a little refreshing compared to what I normally read from big OSS projects.