@screwtape @hayley The lisp curse redemption arc probably needs revisiting, but meh. Scanning over both now, I wonder if the curse can be dismissed in a simpler way. If it really were true that less expressive languages force cooperation to get anything, and it was true that all you get from lisp programmers is shit. Then there still would be a very good reason to work together beyond that it's no longer very hard not to (which is to avoid shit).

But outside of that, the whole thing is kinda bullshit. I know already that people will make their own versions of things in any language just because they want to do things their way. In fact people will refuse to participate in a project and then attempt to rewrite it in an entirely new language for what feels like bullshit reasons when it happens to you. Can you make some kind of weird moral argument about how it'd be better to work together? Yeah, you could. Are they going to care? No lol. Does it actually matter? Not really.

People work collaboratively in ecosystems of code all the time without much communication. People are making libraries, packaging applications, hell even changing the programming languages themselves. I'm not in a slack channel with all of these people where I need to veto their work because if they do it they will wreck my project. Like you would be if you were co-maintainers and they were about to merge a PR without asking.

I don't really know the concrete reasons why we have this now, (it maybe didn't always exist and I imagine people probably used to NIH the hell out of everything before the internet). But if you can allow people to work independently of each other and still build up to something bigger than that's great. And that's what programming languages should enable you to do. npm is fantastic.