Couple of meta-questions from a newcomer after skimming through the history of this channel (and https://futureofcoding.org/ - maybe this could be in the topic?). Context for the questions is an incongruence between our own startup and the apparent, somewhat abstract and academic focus of this community. I'm looking to understand what people look for in this community, what kind of meaning, what incentives keeps everyone here? Sharing of thoughts, obviously; but there are always the questions of personal careers, fame, money, status. All of those nasty cynical things yet which in the end make all the difference. Specifically, I'm looking for what could we (our company) give and what could we potentially look for; to figure out how it could be worth our time to engage deeply and not just lurk and absorb any ideas? I'll expand on the context a bit. On one hand the thing we're building ticks (very) many of the boxes people are looking for here. This is why I'm opening my mouth now, actually. On the other hand we already 'have found the answers' for great many practical questions. So I feel like I couldn't sincerely participate in the high-level discussions which are based on "let's try to figure things out together", because, well, we've figured many things out already, committed to them, and are now going through the phase of actually implementing the stuff. I'll pick one concrete, central example: our language is javascript, enchanced with a transparent ORM to a global workspace of shared resources - powerful, familiar, but offers absolutely no chance for fundamental language design innovation. This would basically rule us out the interests of any people here for whom new language design is The Thing, The Reason To Be Here; maybe because they have a language research oriented academic career, maybe because of personal aspirations; maybe because this channel originates from a discussion group whose identity is new language design. And this is just one example, there are a lot of other similar ones. So finally, the personal question: if I "can't" participate in discussions sincerely without being an advocate, and I "can't" just expect people to jump on-board of our existing train of answers, but I still genuinely believe we've what it takes to answer the core problems put forth here, what should I do?

Sponsor the podcast? 🤣 @stevekrouse

haha

offers absolutely no chance for fundamental language design innovation

Maybe if you could share more about what you’re working on, people here could suggest otherwise.

language design is The Thing

My impression is that people here understand that significant contributions can come from many different approaches that are not limited to PL design.

if I “can’t” participate in discussions sincerely without being an advocate, and I “can’t” just expect people to jump on-board of our existing train of answers, but I still genuinely believe we’ve what it takes to answer the core problems put forth here, what should I do?

It sounds to me that your conclusion (“I don’t know what to do”) is based on two assumptions that don’t necessarily hold. What is stopping you from participating in discussion? Is your only answer to every question going to be “you should see/do what we’re doing”? I doubt that if you are a good listener and adviser! For your 2nd assumption, again if you shared more, maybe you would be surprised at the feedback and interest you get!

I agree with Jack that there's probably a middle ground where you can contribute productively to the conversation. There are others in this group who's projects/products are also further along and less open to design changes. It's valuable to hear from you about how your design decisions played out - the good at the bad. If you're looking to "win over" people here to try out your product, give that a go too!

Thanks, good questions and notes. And I do agree with most of them. I'm sure there is a middle ground. My biggest 'concern' is of course opportunity cost of time invested. Our resources are thin and our bus factor is 1 in like every possible domain. I'm not at all opposed to winning people over (this meta-thread is the beginning), but that is something that I'll do only if I see that there's a reasonable chance I could actually succeed. Concretely put: if it turned out that the dominant interests of the people in this group was academia, then I doubt I could 'win anyone over' essentially because I'm not sure I/we can give academics meaning on top of our platform just yet. The most juicy solutions are there, it would "just be applied research on top of other people's shit, can't get funding for that". So if I win over an academic, it's a pyrrhic victory. If you know what I mean? This is why I'm interested at the incentives of people here.

It seems to me that ultimately people are mostly working on their own projects here anyway (for mostly good reasons I think), so the main vector is idea transfer across projects. I.e. if you exposit ideas that people here like, it’s possibly more likely that your influence will be demonstrated through “citations” where other people reimplement or riff on your idea, rather than start doing their work on top of / integrating with you.

Exactly. Alas, that's exactly the answer I was afraid to hear. Because that indeed means that right now it might not make sense for me to invest that much time right now: we couldn't offer much and we can't expect much. I'll stick around nevertheless, seeing how our platform will enable all kinds of experimentation on top of it in... 6-12 months time scale? I believe that then we can offer more of concrete value that is more compatible with people's own projects. After all, playing nice with other systems and easy integrations is one of our promises. 🙂

It’s a call you need to make, but I feel like you can gain a lot from being here besides users. For example, you might get motivation from seeing people producing and sharing and encouraging each other. And also, when the time comes for you to invite people to use your platform, if you’re known here you might already have people queuing up 😉

That early vs. late stage is better juxtaposition indeed. We're definitely late stage. So maybe the original question is better put as "what can late stage ventures offer and expect from here, seeing how most of the discussion revolves around early stage concepts"?

“what can late stage ventures offer and expect from here, seeing how most of the discussion revolves around early stage concepts”?

Answering for myself, I would simply say Morale! To see others taking their ideas “all the way”. And as @stevekrouse said earlier, any project-agnostic painful lessons learned along the way that you can share!

Such as "sacrificing everything is only worth it if you succeed, and, uh, survivorship bias something something" 😛. I think I'll refrain from using this in the morale boost version of the post if/when I end up making it. 😄

Maybe it's just too late at night, but I don't understand "Valaa" at all from reading the GitHub readme. It sounds like a collection of buzzwords and features but there's not enough detail to understand. What problems is it trying to solve (and what are the non-goals)? What other projects are similar to it and what are the pros (and cons) of Valaa compared to alternatives? What can someone accomplish with it and when/why should they choose it over alternatives? And, does it involve a new programming language? (I don't suggest answering these questions here - just change the readme and say you've done so.)

I think sharing your progress here on a group of open minded people willing to review new approaches to programming is useful for "late stage" programming environments, we may be picky or have strong preferences, but I think we are a good "early adopter" group willing to review and try alpha/beta stuff without pointing to the obvious "it's not finished" and provide useful feedback since we are trying to solve the same problem in different ways and many invest a lot of mental time thinking about this topic

David Piepgrass: it's not too late at night. That's a fundamental problem we have, in trying to describe what we have*. Essentially the goal was creating a new interactive content creation and sharing platform, and the main technique to reach that was directing development of distributed (CRUD) event sourcing towards that goal and taking its development to logical conclusion on several different sub-domains. End result is... kind of hard to describe* without 1. face-to-face interaction 2. if one can't assume the listener knows event sourcing and 3. without demonstrating how it works*. As such, the buzzwords in the README.md are indeed just condensed descriptions of implemented features, not design goals. The document was written with the specific intent of "dump all truths we have in there with minimal effort, and expand when required and when the particular system has stabilized". All the items marked with * are items where writing good documentation takes non-trivial time investment, so I need to make a prioritization decision on whether to invest time doing those things. Hence my original question about the dynamics of people in this forum. The arrogance of these thoughts is out of necessity. We believe in our solution and have staked our medium-term livelihoods on it without comfortable funding, which is kind of insane... we've tried looking for funding of all kinds: but investors understandably want relatively straightforwardly understandable concepts. No one wants to feel stupid when investing their own or someone else's money. Our concept is not such a simple concept unless one groks event sourcing. So no big funding, no surprise there. But that means we gotta prioritize stuff that actually pays or directly improves our solution on the technical side. Anyway, I digress. There's a strong probability that I will invest the time in updating the documentation that is written with this community in mind in the coming months when a good opportunity arises. From my technical perspective this is the most promising community audience indeed.