Comment by j-james | Hacker News Reader

Comment by j-james | Hacker News Reader

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Some context: dom96 here was the BDFL-in-2nd-command of Nim for quite some time. There is personal beef between dom96 and some of the primary nimskull contributors, which mostly involved a lot of name-calling, personal insults, and critiques of leadership and leadership effectiveness, that eventually lead to dom96 banning one of the aforementioned contributors, stalling quite a lot of interesting compiler work and partially sparking nimskull. It's all quite boring stuff.

dom96 eventually had a falling out with the Nim BDFL too (which I'm surprised did not happen earlier: the BDFL is... brusque, charitably) and so has been inactive in either Nim community because, well, obviously. But: in all my years involved with Nim, I have seen the nimskull developers to be pretty consistently great to work with? I think they handle things professionally, are not rude, and treat other's work with care (you will maybe notice they have a code of conduct exposing an explicit intent to do so). Which makes what happened between them and dom96 all the stranger in my eyes, but I was less active back then, and there is certainly context I am missing.

tl;dr meh

It's no big reveal that I was involved and optimistic about Nim for a long time, though "BDFL-in-2nd-command" is a stretch for someone who couldn't even get the community to instate a Code of Conduct. That's one of the many many reasons I left.

My many years of involvement with Nim is what I believe qualifies me to speak on the individuals in the forked project. That being said, I am no longer involved with Nim. I don't want to get reinvolved. I just want to warn people about individuals who were abusive to me (and others) for many years.

I banned very few people during my time in the Nim community, and never without good reason. I don't know who you could be referring to here. I'm sure you left this comment with the best of intentions, but you say it yourself, you were less active back then and have had minimal interactions with me on the subject.

Ah, I was referring to disruptek. I don't know why you two hated each other's guts, mostly due to being less active back then indeed. For what it's worth I didn't think the banning was undeserved: but the interactions you two had always struck me as strangely animus, and not anything like anything I've ever seen between him and anybody else, and certainly not between any other nimskull developers and anyone, ever.

It is perhaps notable that the nimskull project has a Code of Conduct (and a rather good one at that). I think it is indicative of serious intention to make a welcoming community, and I don't think that contributing members having had in the past what really struck me as personal grievances turning into open-air malice undermines that: particularly, such behavior would fall under the Code of Conduct itself. But again, I have not seen such behavior - quite the opposite! - outside of what happened between you two.

I don't hate anybody's guts and never have. There was a time when I could not post in the Nim community without an aggressive response from the person you mention - and would often enter the space to find many unprompted aggressive messages about me from him in what amounted to a harassment campaign. Contrary to your experiences, I have seen him frequently interact with others in the same way (and some have left the community because of it).

I'm glad that their community has a code of conduct. It is unfortunate that members there have never applied those rules to their interactions with and about me, nor with many others they targeted in the Nim community.

For your clarity going forward: I did not ban him, though I was one of the people who advised and agreed with that course of action. All decisions on whether to ban someone or not were taken by Araq (at the time at least).

It surprises me to hear you say you have never seen him engage that way with anybody else, given that you acknowledge that his banning was deserved. If I recall he was banned for aggressive behaviour towards _multiple_ members of the community.

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