Jon Pretty

Right now, there seems to be a general lack of awareness about how offputting a community dominated by angry, middle-aged, white men looks. Sure, I'm all of those things too. But I'd like people to say least have some hope that it doesn't have to be this way.

What I don't understand is what you are expecting from libraries authors affected by the "aggressive marketing". They can be nice and fight marketing with facts but it gets tiring. Eventually they either give up or fight back. Both are bad but you can't blame authors.

Well, I don't think I or anyone else should be surprised when someone promotes or defends something they have devoted time and effort to. There's nothing surprising about Raúl defending against perceived criticism of Cats, or John pushing his own libraries and ideas.

To be fair, it's a bit surprising (ok maybe not entirely surprising, but certainly extenuating) to constantly push your own ideas at the expenses of others. It's entirely possible to promote something you have devoted time and effort to without bringing everything else down.

I think this is the crucial bit that upsets people (including myself) the most: just promote your stuff without declaring everything else as inferior and obsolete. This is the sane behavior most people in the Scala community already have and the few notable exceptions stand out.

It's what I try to do, but I also know it's extremely hard to get traction for a technically better solution when there's an incumbent. I have been particularly aware of this with trying to promote Magnolia "agnostically" when everyone else's frame of reference is Shapeless...

I think this has always been the case. It’s also important to remember that these things are never taken in isolation. For example, Shapeless is transitively on almost everyone’s class path, which is the true incumbency. It’s not so much about mindshare.

Continually presenting and re-presenting what is good and beneficial about your own thing is a great way to go about solving this. While it is tempting to include a compare-and-contrast (or worse, contrived strawmen) in such things, doing to is toxic and usually self defeating.