Don't use the mailing lists

I think there are too many words in this article, simply to express that the author had his feelings hurt.

While this may not be the case in this situation, recently I've noticed that people are becoming extreme wimps..

People, especially younger generation can't stand being treated harshly. You can't criticize them, and every response must be nice, politically correct and helpful.

Sometimes you just have to let it go, or simply fight back. And when you do fight back, be prepared because it's unlikely that you will win every time.. Such is life. Grow a pair.

When I was younger it was normal for kids to fight in school. Nobody really cared if you got your ass kicked once in a while. And often times you kicked some ass. This helped people realize that not everyone in their life will be nice and helpful, and that sometimes you need to have a thick skin and ignore what people are saying. Now it seems kids, when they get laugh at or in some one offended, if they can't get help from the adult they just grab a gun or a knife and start killing people because they simply never had a chance to learn how to deal with competition.

In the time it took him to write that post, he could have found his unterminated string and resubmitted.

I originally asked if the author is an adult, but then I decided to revisit the article and saw the link to his CV (http://ironholds.org/cv.html). I'll note that the picture he chose is himself as a small child and that he proudly notes, 'while at university I (amongst other things) occupied my time with acting as the Equality & Diversity officer for the Students' Union, and working as a political campaigner for the Liberal Democrats.'

This leads me to conclude that no, he's not an adult, self-reliant and self-actualised, but is instead still mentally a child, dependent on others for validation. I'm sure he's a very smart guy, but he has got to grow up.

Not defending anyone just a 30,000 foot view.

The issue is that it really appears that it is a clash in personalities. When someone says they love R's community and then emphasis that it is a terrible language they lost me. In Open Source there are many examples of "mean" gate keepers. We see splits in the communities with examples all over i.e. ffmpeg vs libav.

This isn't the way to go about change by belittling the language and then say ALL of mail list when he has a personal issue with one person. This is not going to be healthy nor helpful unless there is documentation on conflict resolution that already took place.

Just my humble opinion.

I agree--I once used a library and noticed that it was missing some functionality. The mailing list had a number of people requesting this functionality. I found an older piece of code with the functionality and updated it to the language of the library. I got license permissions from all the original authors. I submitted it and the maintainers raised some questions about code quality--but one of the maintainers thought there was a workaround and didn't really want to add it. I acted on the code quality issues and the code just sat around and was never accepted and the mailing list still (years later) has people asking for the functionality, but I'm not going to spend more time on it when it seems that outside contributions are not welcome. This was after climbing the barriers to entry of trying to figure out the layout of the project, procedures for submission, etc.

In contrast, there was another project where my student and I noticed a bug in a piece of software and patched it. It was quickly accepted and we moved on. I would be happy to contribute to that project again.

It's all about barriers to entry. If a project wants outside contributors, those barriers need to be low. Of course, the project creators/maintainers are also doing this in their free time, so have the right to do what they want, but they should expect less community contributions if they make those barriers high...