Is this much drama around a tiny niche language normal? I've been happily using Python for over a decade and never encountered weird, dramatic behavior by its creators or main developers.

Could it be that some languages, through the target audience they attract, seal their disastrous fate? By that I mean languages that attract nerds like me or peculiar math-oriented minds who can nit pick at every single detail.

You wouldn't expect this much nit from a mass-scale enterprise language like Java.

Tim Peters and GvR did both hit the news https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/09/core_python_developer... in the past couple of years!

To quote Charles Issawi:

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."

Big projects have big problems to deal with. On small projects with no such distractions, the influence of personalities is relatively larger.

What "drama"? This person's original blog post[0] seems to have merely expressed general frustrations with the Racket language and ecosystem. It's not clear to me whether anything dramatic happened here.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240110183908/https://blog.winn...

>Is this much drama around a tiny niche language normal?

What drama are you referring to? The post is a pretty breezy explanation of how he handed off some old projects.

[No comment on the drama angle]

I wouldn't call Racket a 'tiny niche' language--its influence is much greater. It is a direct modern descendent of Lisp-1 languages.

I used it to do SiCP and learned a lot about what a language or program can do (as I imagine many others have as well).

This is not a creator or main developer of Racket and perhaps not even an active community member.

And Python doesn't have drama. Since when?

Small languages, especially languages without an organization behind them, don't have anybody to manage the oddities of the humans creating it. Python had that one core developer that was banned by the oversight board. There was quite a bit of drama around that, but it was buried in the boring Bureaucracy of it all.

I'd be surprised if some of the Java developers wouldn't be assholes or weird, just statistically. The difference there is that you don't interact with the individual developers. Oracle handle all of that internally.

Never ever underestimate people’s need to not be bored. The meditative mind is not something that’s just handed to you.