Hi Michael,

 

On Thu, 28 Feb 2019 at 22:30, Michael Zeder <[hidden email]> wrote:

Dear community,

I am a silent follower of this list. Now, I feel urged to speak up not on a technical, but a community matter.

I don't agree with your position, but thanks for putting yourself on the line in your concern for the community.  

Some will agree with you, but personally I spent quite some time reading around the comments you linked and didn't arrive at the same conclusion.

Hopefully I've expressed a balanced enough position that this doesn't draw too many responses.

 

I frequently research on Smalltalk-related topics (computer scientist, try to devote time to open source dev next to my small enterprise). And more and more, I notice that Google search results show very much on top of the result list contributions by a self-appointed "Mr. Smalltalk" aka R.K.Eng. who excels at SEO and flooding social media.

I agree "Mr Smalltalk" is quite a presumptive title, but really anyone following the mail lists soon gets an idea of who are the community merit leaders. 

 

While self-initiatives are a thriving force for open communities, in this case: 

* one individual is hogging credit and applause, without ever having committed a single line of code,

You are right he hasn't committed any code, but I've not actually seen him claim credit for any code in Pharo, so this point seems off.

 

putting himself into focus (without having any profound knowledge; to the contrary: he shows a deep ignorance towards "our" and other languages, throwing around dubious advertisment slogans), 

* ...is throwing around with wrong claims (pulling off any potentially interested developer),

Many people criticized his early articles (including me) for attacking other languages rather than just promoting the positives of Smalltalk

But I think that had an impact. I find his later articles more balanced and I generally like the way his writing matured. 

 

* ...is doing SEO to make Google show his own results before FOSS community or sciences pages.

I think its equally likely that most in our community are too busy coding to try getting articles ranked,

so its more lack of effort by most of us. Most of his articles mention Pharo so people end up finding us anyway.

 

* ...is getting traction (and money) for his own ends (publicity for the self-appointed "Mr. Smalltalk")

Any money he gets for his writing is not anything that concerns me personally.  Those articles are his own effort. 

 

* ...denies community leadership by merit (Pharo core developers do know, what they have created and where they want to go in the future,

I don't see him claiming leadership of our community or trying to set our agenda.  

He just didn't let community criticism of his writing slow him down. 

All I observed is that several people bit him and he bit back - fairly usual sort of poor communication on both sides (including me).

 

and which audience we should target, they don't need a clueless person telling them to "get into TIOBE index", just for example)

Such opinions have no impact on me.  Its just an opinion.

 

* is claiming credit for the work others have done,

I don't see him claiming he did any work on Pharo codebase, so this is off point. 

 

fostering his own publicity (not the interests of Pharo/VisualWorks etc).

Fostering his own publicity has no impact on me.  

But actually I believe his heart is about fostering Pharo publicity, even if some articles are not written the way I'd write them.

 

Here is the Medium thread that made me write this mail to you all.

https://medium.com/@michael.z3d3r/who-is-this-self-appointed-mr-9ad9a18676eb

https://medium.com/@richardeng/even-people-who-understand-prototypal-inheritance-do-not-like-it-heres-an-inconvenient-truth-459330fe4e2e

the bottom line of our tedious flame war in a screenshot:

Him swearing about a group of Pharo people is good ammunition to bring to the mail list to support your point, 

but I also see he was rather provoked.  Overall I feel this extract was better left in that small corner of the internet

rather than fan flames here.

 

PS: a side note on Javascript (with lower S). wether you love or hate this quirky lovechild of Lisp and Self/Smalltalk, telling JS developers they are stupid and that they should abandon powerful Vue.js, for example, in favor of Amber Smalltalk [cudos to Amber devs! great thing!]) is utterly stupid!

Agree.  But banning everyone in the world for similar stupidity would leave the internet awfully quiet.

 

Every professional Javascript developer, who is trying Smalltalk the first time, because he/she has read in a post of "Mr. Smalltalk", that it is better, will instantly dismiss Smalltalk and be disappointed. I love Smalltalk (certainly more than JS), but it is detrimental, to throw around with these wrong claims (which in the end are only a self-serving, ego-centric, attention-greedy campaign to promote "Mr. Smalltalk" himself, a total newbie, who claims credit for the work of others).

Your repeated "claims credit for the work of others" is quite provocative and I haven't noticed this in his writings. Could you provide a link?

 

My suggestion: This community is open and inclusive. But we should clarify, that if a single individual repeatedly goes against those, who do the actual work, claims credits, insults people, then this person is not fit to be part of this community. It sheds a very bad light onto us. --> If R.K. Eng cannot respect community structure and decisions, we should exclude him officially and publicly take distance from this person.

Consider the Streisand Effect... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

and the sort of behaviour that our detractors could have a field day with.

Personally I think such action is likely to damage our public image more than anything Richard has done.

Richards actions are his. Ours are ours.  

Thanks for you concern.

cheers -ben