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@Patricia The awfulness of a programming language community is directly proportional to the age of the language, in my experience. If someone has had their identity attached to the same programming language for several decades, they're likely to be broken in some uniquely spectacular ways.

This observation is completely unrelated to my experiences with the Lisp community.

@bodil rofl

@bodil and probably valid. Though I’ve met some really nice COBOL devs

@Patricia COBOL is kind of an outlier because they're not really advocating for COBOL being a great language for 2024, they're just out there quietly making bank on maintaining the legacy systems nobody has the nerve to rewrite.

Advocates for Lisp, Smalltalk, Prolog, though, I'm immediately suspicious. And C, well, just start running.

I'd include FORTRAN except I strongly suspect the few FORTRAN advocates I've seen this side of the millennium were just doing it as a gag.

@bodil hey @veronica is the Fortran community nice?

@Patricia @bodil No idea. I only interacted with one or two outside of the academic physics bubble, and even then only briefly.

@Patricia @bodil Only committee member I know of is Steve Lionel, who used to work for Intel, and anyone who's ever read Intel's Fortran forums would know who he is.

(He's on Mastodon.)

@janl @Patricia Yes, absolutely no grumpy old men telling the kids they're doing it wrong and we solved this 25 years ago in the Erlang community.

(Unless they're hiding behind those handsome moustaches.)

@bodil @janl are there kids in the Erlang community?

@Patricia @janl That's the Elixir community.

@bodil @Patricia

@janl @bodil @Patricia Thank you all. Made my day

@sushee @janl @Patricia I like to do all the cool shit but run for the hills the second someone calls me an "X programmer."

@sbi @Patricia It was designed by a man heavy committee based partially on the previous work of the woman who tends to get the blame for it.

@bodil @Patricia :-(

@chucker @Patricia I think the chasm is keeping up, I had a Rust kid in my mentions recently asserting that Haskell is inferior to Rust because it doesn't have a borrow checker.

@hunger @bodil I’m not sure how “organic” it is to consistently protect people who are harmful. That seems to be explicitly cultivating a culture.

@Patricia @hunger If I had a penny for every language community I've seen growing organically into having a fascist/predator problem…

@bodil @Patricia Every community that does not actively throw out toxic people is doomed to become a toxic dump :-(