@samdphillips yes but I think OSS language projects probably have some unusual characteristics

Agreed

Also racket is somewhat unusual because the academics here both have a job that lets us work on racket but also have a lot of independence about it

I was thinking more about that this morning. It seems like a majority of successful (more than 100 users?) languages have some sort of institutional support.

Most of the OSS work I do is Yak Shaving.

(I haven’t listened to the podcast yet; but have seen reviews of the content of the book).

But from my somewhat limited (?) interaction with multiple communities I think the makeup of the community is different at different stages in a languages lifecycle @samdphillips.

Which means the burden on OSS maintainers and expectations of users can be very different at different parts in the lifecycle

@samdphillips I agree, but one potential issue with institutional support is that institutions can change their priorities. For Racket, that would require something very drastic (like IU failing) or for me (or other Racketeers) to change their priorities

Yes. I was thinking about Mozilla and Rust too. I haven’t been following who isn’t at Mozilla working on it, but it sounds like it is secure. Also there is some point (with all OSS really) where a maintainer may switch employers, but they still work on the project a lot (thinking Guido or LInus.)

@spdegabrielle Thanks for the link! I listened to the podcast, bought the book, and I’m about half-way through.

It seems good. The book starts out with things that I knew, but some of which I didn’t realize (if that makes sense), which is a good strategy to make someone like a book. PLs are are well represented among the examples, including Python, Clojure, and Rust. I don’t think the book is going to say much about the effect of institutional support, but that’s just from flipping though parts of the second half. Overall, I think it’s going to be more descriptive than prescriptive, so it doesn’t just tell us what to do next. :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks for the tip, I will check out this episode.