Internals and Newcomers and the Sidelines (WAS: Adopt Code of Conduct)

[Apologies for the re-post; I’m re-sending this with a new subject because it’s really not about the CoC RFC.] > On Jan 11, 2016, at 19:40, François Laupretre <francois@php.net> wrote: > > If we want to deal with the reasons why people avoid internals, the let's go and analyze > the problem first ? I will start asking whether we really want to attract newcomers. The question > may sound ridiculous but I think we don't, mostly because most people here see newcomers as > just a source of annoyment and silly questions/RFCs. Additional evidence shows that we never did > much effort to help integrate newcomers. > > So, the tone on the list is, IMO, just a small part of the problem. As long as there's no > consensus on whether we want to attract newcomers and the effort we're ready to do to integrate > them, discussing about the details of a CoC seems a bit prematurate to me. I agree with this 100%. This is yet another example of the toxic internals problem. Regardless of one's views on the CoC proposal, the conduct of php-internals as a whole has been reprehensible. Whether anyone agrees with that statement or not is almost besides the point. Internals has a *reputation* for being toxic, and whether or not that reputation is justified, *it exists*, and internals is not doing anything to counter that reputation. Certainly not with the CoC discussion. I have watched internals for probably ten years now. I have *never* gotten the impression that internals was actually seriously interested in cultivating newcomers. Lip service is paid from time to time, but at the end of the day, nothing ever changes. So let's say, hypothetically, internals actually, seriously, wants newcomers. I've used C since 1997, PHP since 1999, come from a CS background, and PHP is my favorite language (well, maybe it's a tie with Objective-C). At least, it's the language I use most often, so I have a vested interest in helping it get better. I am exactly the sort of person internals should be courting to join the "team". And *every* time I start to think, "ok, I'm finally going to dust off those old patches and write some RFCs" this shit happens, and I reconsider and go back to lurk mode because I have no interest in participating in conversations about facists, whether real or imagined. I've got one RFC under discussion, and another one in draft that should be ready for discussion soon. Hell, I had been collecting emails for a few weeks and was just about to start work on (what I had hoped would be an ongoing series of) a weekly summary of internals (similar to what Pascal Martin had been doing in 2014) as an excuse to actually read all of internals to help wrap my head around what was actually going on from a tech perspective. Then the CoC thing blows up, and it's all so disheartening. Makes me question whether putting in the effort was worth it, and well, you can forget about anyone trying to write an impartial summary of the CoC discussion. And that's just internals. There's also apparently twitter and reddit flamewars and namecalling going on that I'm just as happy to know nothing about. This is getting a bit ranty. But internals deserves it. You all may be great programmers, but in terms of making people *want* to work on php-src, you're shitty salespeople. The reputation for internals being toxic surely bleeds over to everyone else who knocks PHP as being a shitty language. Only now, they get to say, "what a bunch of amateurs, the language devs can't even discuss a code of conduct without calling each other nazis". Stop the nonsense. Get better, grow up, treat each other with respect, and act like the adults you are. I'd like to work with you all, but you make it dammned hard to want to. -John -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php