I think it's great that you're tinkering with a compiler. But a language is more than a compiler; good language design requires a lot of programming experience, good taste and intuition, an ability to absorb programming language theory, and, yes, good programming skills. Araq has proven that he is a very capable language designer.
It sounds like you're taking Araq to task for trying out new things. And indeed, Nim is certainly a fairly expansive language. But a lot of the things he's trying are really cool, and I want to see the person with the _actual vision_ get a chance to try those things out without being encumbered by the need to write laborious commit message, because "democracy" and "best practices". Between Araq spending a marginal x minutes doing more on value types, and writing "clearer" commit messages, I'll choose the former, any day. I also trust him to jettison ideas that don't work.
I really think it's red flag when someone proposes to fork a language without being able to offer single reason that's actually related to language design. Sorry, I do realize this may come across as a bit aggressive, but I'm inclined to view you as a presumptious ingrate.
And really: when you come up with an original language that captures the imagination of scores of developers, I'll pay you the same respect.
Right now we are not forking "the language" as a collection of ideas etc. as you seem to think. Instead we are doing a much simpler thing - we are forking "the code". Of course former is built on latter, but current focus is making codebase usable for other contributors.
The main difference here seems to be that I interpret the need to "write laborious commit message" as a basic human decency that shows I'm respect other people's time. Five minutes on "value types" is not a lot all things considered, but pretty much enough to write the commit message.
This attitude always puzzled me to be honest - you just spent half an hour, maybe more, to write the code and have a good understanding of what you had just done and for which reasons. How hard would it be to sit down and type it out and save time for someone who comes next?
It sounds like you're taking Araq to task for trying out new things. And indeed, Nim is certainly a fairly expansive language. But a lot of the things he's trying are really cool, and I want to see the person with the _actual vision_ get a chance to try those things out without being encumbered by the need to write laborious commit message, because "democracy" and "best practices". Between Araq spending a marginal x minutes doing more on value types, and writing "clearer" commit messages, I'll choose the former, any day. I also trust him to jettison ideas that don't work.
I really think it's red flag when someone proposes to fork a language without being able to offer single reason that's actually related to language design. Sorry, I do realize this may come across as a bit aggressive, but I'm inclined to view you as a presumptious ingrate.
And really: when you come up with an original language that captures the imagination of scores of developers, I'll pay you the same respect.