Anyone seeking to become a dictator, benevolent or not, shouldn't get the job.
FOSS has enough issues with people who were merely anointed dictators.
FOSS has enough issues with people who were merely anointed dictators.
The reality is much more complex. If bdfl can work for open source it technically can work for the real thing as well. The keyword here is "can".
If your open source dictator sucks, you can use different project, or fork it, or start your own.
If your real life dictator sucks, you can move your family for half your life savings and hope your next dictator is better, or try to protest and get killed.
Democracy is also a bit of an illusion. How often has a protest changed things? why is there huge wealth inequality and power concentrated among the few? Democracy Looks like much of the bad things associated with "dictatorships" with useless freedoms like voting and protesting as an outlet.
Of course it's not a hostile takeover, he'll try to build something that convinces people that he's on the right track, and I wish him the best of luck with that. There's a small chance that the project succeeds and essentially becomes the successor language to Haskell, and there's a large chance that the project fizzles out, and both of those outcomes are fine. The worst possible outcome is that it succeeds well enough to fragment the ecosystem, but not enough to really take over.
From the pov of the Haskell community and the way it has been shaped by its academic origins, and by the work and organizational choices of SPJ on GHC, there is little chance the community doesn't see this as a hostile takeover.
It's better to think of yourself as a shepherd, visionary, leader, etc. Mentally framing yourself as dictator affects your thinking. In short, BDFLs can more easily become assholes.
Any project needs good leadership, of course, and at the start that leadership is going to be concentrated amongst a tiny number of people, maybe even just one.
It's going to be hard to encourage contribution if, right off the bat, you say "I'm BDFL. End of discussion." So the author of the project might find themselves in a position where they have actively reduced buy-in.
Frankly, it is the clearest thing about the project, how it will be run. One vision from a personality whose thought style comes through in Spades. That is refreshing.
Anyone who joins the project knows exactly who they are signing up to help.
Swing for the fences Nick Seagull!
I'm not so sure of that. The Neohaskell site seems designed to attract the naive. If someone isn't already using Haskell, how can they know what they are getting into with Neohaskell? Someone like Gabriella can see the substance (or lack of it) behind the claims, but to a non-Haskeller, there is nothing to go by except the sales pitch. Not good.