You tried to apply far too much pressure over too large a surface area. Either make a more focused approach by not chasing Free Software and XMPP supremacy at the same time, or find ambient ways to give people options without forcing them to make choices in the direction you want. In particular, complaining about bridges usually doesn’t get the discussion to a useful place; instead, try showing people on the other side of the bridge how wonderful your experience is.

Also, I get that you might not personally like IRC, but you need to understand its place in high-reliability distributed systems before trying to replace it; the majority of them use IRC instead of XMPP for their disaster recovery precisely because its protocol jankiness makes it easier to wield in certain disaster situations.

I’ve put ASTs directly into git repositories by encoding each leaf as a blob and each tree as a tree. Since git objects are content-addressed, this gives deduplication of ASTs for free, including CSE for sufficiently-pure ASTs.

In this case, we are discussing the leadership of a community project; the leaders are the ones who set policy for the project. In this sense, yeah, it’s a political situation.

Given your username, I’m a little surprised that you wouldn’t recognize that the leaders of community projects are politically important…

PLDI is political; in general, any sort of language-design process is political. This is because language is expressive and also constraining, so the expressible and easy-to-express concepts in any language are its de facto default policies.

Social conservatives tend to produce languages which are patrician and sadistic in their demands upon their users; C and Go, D, Hoon and Nock, Hare, and V all come to mind. They see these languages as offering “choice” and power to the end-user, and see languages which have redundant structures and safety, like Ada or Pascal, as “bondage & discipline”.

You’re likely familiar with the frustration of using designed-by-committee languages, too; say, C++ or Python. These systems tend to evolve social conservatism as a way of preventing an explosion of features, as happened to Perl and is happening to Rust.

Hopefully this is good food for thought. Your choice of language is not politically neutral, but occurs within a social context and has policy implications. Work at a PHP shop for a few years and you’ll suddenly care quite a bit about which languages you use!

Walter Bright has fairly odious political opinions; like many social conservatives these days, he likes to complain about wokeness and communism, and I would completely understand a community fork simply to remove his control over various parts of the D language.

Also, just for a quick sanity-check: Which languages have you invested/migrated to, only to find that “political stunts” had a “negative impact” on your planned development?

It’s a little surprising to see Conda mentioned but not Nix.