Comment by h8liu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by h8liu | Hacker News Reader

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I think the issue is that Russ should have clearly told the dep people that if the showstopper issues are not handled, then he will seek for some other solution, e.g. build one by himself.

However, what happened was that he told the dep people "I will build a dep tool myself to understand more on the problem details", which implies "after I understand more, I will come back to you and discuss more", but not "after I build the tool myself, I will just integrate my version into the official tool". For this part, Russ was not executing his own words, or at least delivered the wrong impressions. Maybe this result should be already well expected based on Russ's personality or how the golang team did stuff in the past, but many programmers are not that politically awareing..

It is not the technical result that the "vgo" solution kills "dep" saddens dep people. It is rather the form of communication: "vgo" stabs "dep" in the back, by emerging suddenly out of Russ's pocket, and essentially claims immediate victory using the power of the Go core team. When the vgo posts are out, and the vgo proposal is posted (and it is not really bad technically), there is really no effective way for the rest of the community to reject it.

Russ could have kept his words by going back to the dep people and told them about what he learned from writing "vgo", and then move forward with integrating "vgo" if a consensus cannot be reached. Eventually, Russ might just be able to get the same technical results as today anyways (but maybe with larger communication overhead).

What the dep people essentially says here is that, if Russ really wants, they can also implement exactly "vgo" from "dep", but they never got the chance.

If I were in Russ's shoes and I had told someone as politely as I could that their solution exhibits what I consider showstopper issues, I wouldn't expect to have to clarify that I find that solution entirely unacceptable and flawed from its very design. There's no issue in the clarity of communication when the term 'showstopper' is thrown around.

Russ said he was going to go and build a tool to understand the problem better. In no way does that imply that any lessons he learns from the implementation must be communicated back to the dep committee. But for the sake of argument, let's say that did happen. Then what? Does Russ practically force the dep committee to implement vgo out of the remains of dep? Why would he do that when he just spent a month or two implementing vgo from scratch? Why bother going back to a problematic group that doesn't believe their core issues are showstoppers? If that difference of perspective exists and they're not willing to debate that, to say nothing of the fact that they feel that they should be on the receiving end of the burden of proof, what more can be gained from them from Russ's perspective?

hmm.. I was not aware that Russ used the word "showstopper" until recently in his tweets, and even if he literally used the word in the past, the word of the meaning was not delivered, reading from the post here.

That said, the dep people also made a similar mistake on not clearly confirming with Go core team that they had a chance to integrate dep into the official toolchain eventually. They wanted dep to be the thing, and they really thought that they were on the right track.. poor folks..

If Russ managed to influence the "problematic" group to do what he wants, rather than doing it by himself, he could give these people a meaningful place in the Go community. That is the gain. If that is worthy or not (comparing with discarding 2-month work on Russ's own time) depends on your own perspectives, and I am not sure what Russ thought or thinks. No matter how, it will affect how the community grows in the future.

So this goes back to the root issue about how the Go core team view its Google-external language community (or even more fundamentally, if they will be rewarded/recognized by Google if they did a good job on making the community happy). Specifically, do they want to carry the responsibility to deliver messages to the community clearly, at least to some certain extent? Opinionated is fine and firing users (e.g. users who think generics is a must) is fine, sometimes even preferred, but hurting people that were willing to follow and contribute might not be the best way to go.

The implementation of vgo (so simple) cannot be compared to dep. It can explain why it was more easy to just do it than spend time to explain. It's often like that in dev, when we find a simpler solution in our own code we just do it and throw away the old complicated one.

Yep, this is it. Russ himself admits it. He was corresponding with Sam about his ideas and thought that would be sufficient. Whereas, he should have done that with the entire community and been more explicit about where he was going.

"Showstopper" is a word with a specific meaning in software development. If your customer tells you about a showstopper and you ignore it, that is bad.

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