Imagine realizing you wasted a decade of your life in the false hope of making a difference, but couldn’t because of a dysfunctional community dynamic… I can’t because I haven’t done that, and perhaps you can’t either.
It may read this way to you but that’s the nature of blogs. They’re public diaries. Narcissism is often part of the medium itself.
The problem is she had specific ideas of what would make C++ better, and when 500 smart people are in the room there will be people who disagree. I've seen a lot of what I thought were good ideas get shot down when someone else brought out an objection I hadn't though of. Sometimes someone listens to the objection, spends a couple years of rework, and the process repeats a few times until the objections are satisfied, or at least the majority agree they are worth ignoring. This is not easy, but it is a required part of making them useful. Anything else just adds more inconsistencies until C++ is completely unusable.
Many people cannot handle it and think it is the C++ community being obstructionist when in fact it is just that we all have different needs, the only thing in common is we need a language that we can use for our problem so you better not mess that up.
That would be true, except large parts of the current C++ process are broken. The process advocates for papers, biasing towards people with personal quests and a lot of free time. I had many (informal) objections to <random> while it was in the standards process, but since I didn't have time to write a paper, the library got waved through in its broken state.
Completely agreed, but sometimes blog posts by ordinary writers end up on the front page here, and it’d be good to consider that maybe they weren’t expecting tens of thousands of people would read it. In this case I think it pays to cut the author some slack and sympathize a bit.
The author has clearly had a rough time, and there’s no need for an internet pile-on. At the very least it’s not constructive and needlessly personal to label the author a narcissist as in the top level comment I’m responding to.
Maybe the ability to “make a difference” while being disconnected from the community enough to not see the dysfunction is the dysfunction.
I’ve never fully understood the languagism stuff and I have openly mocked “… considered harmful” but maybe languagism should be considered harmful. Seriously, if you like writing software, isn’t the tooling a medium? Bad tools is no fun but you can still make software, you can solve problems, you can see it work, that’s what it’s about, right?
It may read this way to you but that’s the nature of blogs. They’re public diaries. Narcissism is often part of the medium itself.