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The success of Go depends on a healthy community. I am quite happy to lose some talented people if they can't play well with others.

> The success of Go depends on a healthy community. I am quite happy to lose some talented people if they can't play well with others.

Hear! Hear!

What prevents someone like linus torvalds from being kicked out for cussing at people? Would linux be where it is today? Those are the type of people I am referring to. Not racist people, for example.

Now I understand that his issues are not the ones that are ultimately the goal of fixing here. But where do you draw the line? And is is the programming languages responsibility to police this?

Where is the CoC for C anyways:) ?

It's pretty hard to kick Linus out of his own project. That's how he does things and that's what his contributors will apparently put up with. I guess it works for him.

But I don't want to work with people who behave like Linus does (at his worst), regardless of how good they are.

The people who do contribute to the Go core are very talented hackers who also manage to treat each other with respect, so obviously it can be done.

Agreed on the hard to kick linus out of linux.

However, this is an interesting discussion. Linus (to my knowledge, please feel free to post evidence otherwise) has not been racist or displayed misogynistic behavior, has he?

So, here you have a very talented indivdual, who is very opinionated and uses some coarse language at times.

While I could also go without the coarse language, he is often right (not saying 100% of the time, but he has earned his reputation) and I would absolutely hate if by adding a CoC you lose people like him.

So, the CoC could clearly articulate that linus-like behavior is ok, and racism is not, it makes it hard to police. Especially when on this very thread, you say you would rather not work with people like that, so then do we add coarse language to the CoC too?

Thoughts?

You should read the Django Code Of Conduct before venturing further into this discussion, because what 'enneff is talking about isn't simply harassment.

What they're trying to do is set expectations about decorum and professional courtesy; for instance, if you're on the mailing list or IRC channel and someone asks a question with an "obvious" answer that has been covered 10 times before, how are community participants expected to respond to that?

Lots of communities without codes of conduct get testy, hostile, inhospitable, snarky, or obstreperous when those kinds of things happen, and that makes the community harder to engage with, especially for newcomers.

Thanks for your reply - I will read it. This is something that is interesting to me, and I hope it doesn't come across as I am taking sides - but more asking questions and expressing my first initial fears, given my experience with some engineers who are 'rough around the edges' but are invaluable in their experience.

For the record I am in no way saying I want the community of golang to put up with this stuff. It should even be un-cool to use bad language, and of course completely not-ok-at-all to be racist, or harass people, etc.

I certainly won't stop using go if there is a CoC. I simply hope that it doesn't turn into a framework for people not having thick skin when an someone who does not have a soft approach is giving out useful information.

If it is truly gotten so bad that we have to have that to also have a wider effort of dealing with really bad stuff like racism or harassment then I guess so be it. Maybe my head is in the sand, but I was curious what has happened like this in the go community?

More my bigger question which no one has really commented on, but, why not have this on the go-nuts forum as a CoC for the forum, and have it on the IRC channels?

For example, HN has some guidelines, such as the don't be overly negative thing and what not. So, can communities like email groups, irc, and sites like HN not help our culture along enough?

Curious to hear people's objective thoughts on this. I did some quick research. Django has a pretty elaborate CoC. Python is very brief, and leaves a ton open to interpretation. Ruby on Rails doesn't appear to have one. Ruby does not have one. C does not have one.

What communities has this been a problem in? I have heard of some in Python. Just curious as this is a new issue to me, and being in this industry for 15 years, I have just gotten use to terse people, and have experienced very little harassment or racism. I see articles lately dealing with misogyny, but have yet to have to deal with that fortunately. Possibly, I am just lucky?

> And being in this industry for 15 years, I have experienced very little harassment or racism. I see articles lately dealing with misogyny, but have yet to have to deal with that fortunately. Possibly, I am just lucky?

I think a moment of thought would be enough to conclude that yes, you are just lucky.

Maybe it's because I do not use IRC hardly ever?

I have worked at 3 extremely well known technology companies, 3 start-ups, and had dozens and dozens of consulting projects. I have managed teams between 3 and 40 people, co-ed teams, and have served all kinds of engineering roles. (I simply say this, as I do get around quite a bit, not trying to say anything other than that).

Sure I have seen the occasional issue both online and in real life. But they don't seem specific to a programming language, it's usually one person out of line and the immediate surrounding community (employer, or forum) handles.

Maybe this issue is not as wide-spread as people think? Would love to hear reports of toxicity in the golang community specifically.

Or maybe people are in fear, and this is a preventative action?

>Maybe this issue is not as wide-spread as people think?

People in general don't think it is. Anglosaxons do.

We know what the community is like with Linus because we can live it. We don't know if his actions or reputation have pushed away other even more talented people though. We don't even know if a few influential people early on telling him his behaviour was not ok might have changed it completely for the better.

I don't think a lot of Linus' behaviour is ok but he gets away with it because it is so entrenched now.

so, just to be clear, you you would vote for a CoC that would not put up with people that are coarse like linus, even if they do not harass people or engage in worse activities?

On the one hand, I would love if we could change those people, so that they could still contribute, but be better behaved. However, trying to change people is usually not very effective.

But on the other hand, personally, if I had to take the chance to learn something from someone while ignoring what I dislike about them, vs not learning that thing, I would choose to learn it, every time.

Yes I would. You can learn from Linus sure, but you can learn just as effectively from him if he isn't badly behaved. Do you think he acts like that towards his family? Of course not because he knows it isn't acceptable. It's just become acceptable on the lists.

What you can't do because of his bad behaviour is learn from any of the people that have avoided entering the community because of the toxicity. Linus is good but he's not omnipotent. It only takes one person like him becoming acceptable to make a community toxic and kill off any hope of a lot of people entering the space.

You talk about how people just need to grow thicker skins but the truth is they don't. They can just avoid the community and share their talents elsewhere and that is where the true loss comes from.

I hear you, I really do.

I wish I had not met so many brilliant people that have the linus attitude. I would say maybe linus influenced them, but they are both on the windows and linux sides.

These people I continue to work with because they have taught me so much. They have been hard on me when I have been wrong and they have mentored me. I certainly would not be where I am if I did not grow thick skin.

However, I would definitely draw the line if I was ever harassed or was in a toxic community. I never got into IRC or Python. Maybe thats the key?

Linux, on the other hand, I don't classify as "toxic", overall, do you? I do occasionally read the LKML ( I don't subscribe ) and I have certainly seem some edgy behavior there, and times I think its overboard. Opinionated? Check. Intimidating? Check. But toxic?

It's really hard to speculate how many people have avoided working with linux because of this. There is certainly other communities such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. They seem to not have anywhere near the traction linux has, which would lean to indicate that what we are talking about did not hinder the success of linux, or prevent people from contributing to it at large.

>I would definitely draw the line if I was ever harassed or was in a toxic community

But it looks like you wouldn't. From what you're saying you would probably just say your skin wasn't thick enough and you needed to toughen up more.

I think the Linux community has been toxic at times. I don't think the whole community is toxic though. It's such a huge ecosystem with lots of people having control of different parts of it though.

If it was just intimidating because it was highly technical than I'd agree with it not being toxic. The fact that it is intimidating because you don't know if someone is going to rip into you and insult you over a misunderstanding is what makes it toxic.

OpenBSD is worse so it's funny you bring it up. Linux is successful despite the negative aspects not because of them. There are thousands of OS(and private) projects and groups that have died or been forked away from because of toxicity.

You and me are very unlikely to be the target of harassment so it's easy for us to miss it or think it is rare. That doesn't mean it's not there.

> But it looks like you wouldn't

By your definition of toxic, your absolutely correct. With my definition of toxic, I would.

My definition of toxic includes racism, harassment, and misogyny. I feel like most people agree those are toxic, but I guess it is what else gets added to the list, and is it a suggestion, or something we enforce.

The more things that are enforced, and the bigger this list gets, the more this feels the opposite of simple, and not very go-like.

OpenBSD is also known for having some of the most secure code around.

>But I don't want to work with people who behave like Linus does (at his worst), regardless of how good they are.

I, on the other hand, am all for it.

I can't stand working with PC people though...

> Until reading this I was not aware Rust had a CoC. Can anyone comment on the process that was used to create this, and how its going?

I don't know how it was created, but my perception is that it's working extremely well. There's a high emphasis in Rust spaces on being friendly and polite, and as a result places like the IRC channels, email lists and other online forums are extremely pleasant spaces, much more so than the average. Even the Rust subreddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/rust) is a very pleasant and polite place; note the permanent link to the CoC at the top.

http://scattered-thoughts.net/blog/2015/06/04/three-months-o... summed it up beautifully:

> The Rust community seems to be populated entirely by human beings. I have no idea how this was done. I suspect Graydon Hoare deserves a large share of the credit for leading by example but everyone I have interacted with in the community has been friendly and patient.

And here's a good example of this in action: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.rust.devel/4767/

>, I certainly hope that this does not become some sort of thing that people spend a lot of time worrying about,

Some people already had to spend time worrying about behaviour in the community, as made clear by the references to existing reports of harassment. Making the rest of the community spend some time thinking about it is just sharing the load.

I read the linked article. Didn't see them, nor have heard about them. Daily user of go for multiple years now.

Interesting that I am getting down voted multiple times in this thread. Maybe I don't understand down votes? Definitely trying to be polite here and ask serious questions. Can anyone link me to these, I'm genuinely interested. Thank you.

So?

Sorry, I realized I forgot to append: can you link me? I'm interested. Thank you.

No, I don't know of any public reports. You could try asking the author of the post for details, but that would be weird - it has a strong overtone of "I don't believe you".

> Having said that, I certainly hope that this does not become some sort of thing that people spend a lot of time worrying about, enforcing, or baby sitting others.

If that is the case, then that precisely proves the usefulness of such a code.