this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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I don't know how you managed to do this in one thread but I'll leave these two contradictions here:
Like, I'm not going to deny that entitlement in open source is a thing - it is a thing and it is awful.
However, people are giving you their time, effort and money - you keep dismissing that and doubling down on erasing this work.
I mean, unless you want to tell me how I'm acting entitled to your work despite spending countless hours trying to support my community, spending hours sorting through issues that Lemmy has to label them, spending countless hours advocating for people to make issues and for change in the Lemmy project.
And after all that, trying to have any input on prioritising moderation was met with : (paraphrasing) "I will not change my priorities", "I think you're exagerating moderation issues, they work fine" and plain out refusing to acknowledge lolicon pornography as CSAM, refusing to acknowledge my request to put moderators in Lemmy's matrix channels despite obvious problems during weekend.
Seriously, I kinda expected better from you. I have no trust in Lemmy's leadership and your response here just examplifies that.
I appreciate your work in organizing issues and helping to label them, and I'm sorry if I did not give some things proper weight. But are my priorities not my own? Why is this such an affront that I choose what I think is important? Would you like it if I did the same to you, demanded that you change your priorities to do what I want you to do? What if there are thousands of other people asking you the same thing?
Scale is also left out of the equation here. Thousands people are asking 2-4 devs for features. It is simply impossible to please everyone, unless some people do the open source thing, and work on a feature they'd like to have. Many people have and continue to do this, rather than dismissing the project because the small number of developers can't keep pace with issues.
Maybe there'd be plenty more devs if it wasn't written in a new, up and coming, difficult language to understand let alone master. Maybe there'd be more code contributions if existing ones weren't closed because you don't see this being an issue. Maybe there'd be more developers if you'd let there be.
This is a tremendous amount of cope. Implying there are Lemmy users just lining up to contribute PRs if only it wasn't written in Rust. Give me a break!
If someone was competent enough to author code that's fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they're more than capable of translating those skills to Rust. No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn't make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax. Maybe a day, even, if the language you are trying to learn is highly similar to one you already know.
With time, perhaps, but why is someone going to do that as a prerequisite for a spare-time FOSS contribution? People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.
Knowing the minimal syntax of a language to get past compilation errors is not even remotely close to being "competent" in it. You need to learn the language's structures, you need to learn how the compiler works, you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using, you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language... The language used can be a HUGE hurdle to overcome.
"You know Python and Javascript, so you can write competent C++ code that is FOSS-contribution-acceptable if you take a week to learn!" (inb4 memory management and pointers and templates and 'oh no every input field I wrote is a trivial buffer overflow'...)
People also tend to pick up new skills when they have a driving incentive to do so, like supporting a project they have a vested interest in seeing improved.
Most of the bread and butter ones have analogues in other languages you should readily understand. More language-unique structures are rare; the more niche they are, the lower the odds your ability to contribute in a meaningful way hinges on your understanding of them.
You really don't, though? Modern compilers, particularly the Rust compiler, are designed to abstract away as much of the details of compilation as possible. If the project really does need to tickle the compiler a certain way to get it to build, it will almost certainly have a buildscript and/or a readme.
This is true regardless of the language in use. I'm not sure why you brought it up.
I would imagine most of these language-specific security footguns are either A) so specific that you will never hit the conditions where they apply, B) are so blazingly obvious that code review will illuminate what you did wrong and you can learn how to fix it, or C) so obscure that even the project owner doesn't understand them, so you'd be at minimum matching the rest of the codebase quality.
Mind, I am not insinuating that one can simply bang out a whole new submodule of a project in an unfamiliar language with minimal learning time. Large contributions to large projects can be hard to make even when you're a veteran of the language in use, as the complexity of the project in and of itself can be its own massive barrier. But not every contribution needs to be big. And for most contributions, I don't believe the language is the most significant barrier to entry. It's a barrier, sure. But not the biggest one.
I'd wager it's not having a significant impact on the volume of contributions to Lemmy in particular.
Because if you know Python, you know
requestsalready. Or flask, or configparser, or itertools, or maybe even pyqt.Languages all have their own 'most common libraries', which add to the time it takes to learn how to be competent in that language. If a python dev tells me they know all the syntax, but have no clue what itertools or requests are, my eyebrows go up.
There's a lot of language-specific knowledge that needs to be learned before you'll be competent in it, that people don't even think about.