this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions; like many social conservatives these days, he likes to complain about wokeness and communism, and I would completely understand a community fork simply to remove his control over various parts of the D language.
Also, just for a quick sanity-check: Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that "political stunts" had a "negative impact" on your planned development?
I fail to see the relevance of what personal opinions and beliefs he may or may not have. You're making it sound like the goal is not to improve a language ir fix issues, but to take something away from a person just because you disagree with their political opinions. That's hardly good use of anyone's time, and sounds terribly petty behavior.
I wish I had that much free time to be able to waste it being so vindictive about such trifling issues.
I don't waste my time with meaningless irrelevant stuff. Either a tech stack serves it's purpose, or it doesn't. I don't have enough free time to waste it trying to cancel others.
PLDI is political; in general, any sort of language-design process is political. This is because language is expressive and also constraining, so the expressible and easy-to-express concepts in any language are its de facto default policies.
Social conservatives tend to produce languages which are patrician and sadistic in their demands upon their users; C and Go, D, Hoon and Nock, Hare, and V all come to mind. They see these languages as offering "choice" and power to the end-user, and see languages which have redundant structures and safety, like Ada or Pascal, as "bondage & discipline".
You're likely familiar with the frustration of using designed-by-committee languages, too; say, C++ or Python. These systems tend to evolve social conservatism as a way of preventing an explosion of features, as happened to Perl and is happening to Rust.
Hopefully this is good food for thought. Your choice of language is not politically neutral, but occurs within a social context and has policy implications. Work at a PHP shop for a few years and you'll suddenly care quite a bit about which languages you use!
People can say that everything and anything is political as much as they want, it doesn't make it true.
In this case, we are discussing the leadership of a community project; the leaders are the ones who set policy for the project. In this sense, yeah, it's a political situation.
Given your username, I'm a little surprised that you wouldn't recognize that the leaders of community projects are politically important...