https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgroup/55455/6 Swift Forums Core team to form language workgroup Announcements tkremenek (Ted Kremenek) February 20, 2022, 8:41pm #1 The core team is currently looking at restructuring the project's leadership to provide more pathways for community members to become actively involved in the project's stewardship. Swift has gradually introduced more workgroups to focus on technical and non-technical investments (an idea that has been successful in other language and OSS projects). We are looking to push that idea further. In the coming weeks, we hope to introduce a new language workgroup that will focus on the core of the language evolution itself, splitting off this responsibility from the core steering of the project. The intent is to free the core team to invest more in overall project stewardship and create a larger language workgroup that can incorporate more community members in language decisions. More details will be coming soon. Related, some of you have probably heard of @Chris_Lattner3's departure from the core team. Chris took a hiatus last year and has decided to leave the core team to focus his time on other projects. It has been one of the greatest privileges of my life to work with Chris on Swift. I cannot express my gratitude enough for his leadership in starting the project from the very first line of code to pushing it through critical formative years to make it a language to be reckoned with on the world stage. 85 Likes Formalizing a Numerical/ML Working Group taylorswift February 20, 2022, 9:25pm #2 I think this is an amazing development, and will do a lot to get more "ecosystem feedback" into the design of language, particularly from library maintainers and other people involved in the sort of middle-ring infrastructure of the language. best of luck to @Chris_Lattner3 in all his future endeavors! 15 Likes tkremenek (Ted Kremenek) closed February 21, 2022, 5:32am #4 tkremenek (Ted Kremenek) opened February 21, 2022, 11:12am #5 Chris_Lattner3 (Chris Lattner) February 21, 2022, 10:22am #6 Moderator note: this post was originally in the light-weight same-type requirement syntax thread, but only because this thread was locked. We have re-opened this thread and moved this post to separate it from the technical discussion in that thread. Someone asked for more information: #[Pitch 2] Light-weight same-type requirement syntax #[Pitch 2] Light-weight same-type requirement syntax i would like to also hear about the ideas of Chris cc @Chris_Lattner3 I'm sorry but I don't follow swift evolution and haven't been a part of the core team since middle of last year. I don't have enough context to have an informed opinion here. -Chris Hmm got it, its sad that you are not active in this forum and pitch proposals anymore Chris, may i ask why did you leave the core team and abandon swift evolution? ... but their post got deleted by a moderator; they asked me to follow up anyway. After consideration, I decided to respond, but the obvious thread is locked, so I'll respond here. If a moderator thinks this is off topic for this thread, please move it to that one or some other thread, or (if this is somehow considered off-topic for the Swift forums entirely) I can repost somewhere else on the internet. --------------------------------------------------------------------- In any case, Ted's simple answer in this thread is right, but there is of course more behind my decision to leave the Swift core team and the Swift Evolution community. For context, I left Apple over five years ago and the only constant in my life is that I'm always "very busy" :smile:. That said, Swift is important to me, so I've been happy to spend a significant amount of time to help improve and steer it. This included the ~weekly core team meetings (initially in person, then over WebEx), but also many hours reading and responding to Swift Evolution, and personally driving/writing/iterating many Evolution Proposals. As such, my decision to leave the core team last summer wasn't easy. To answer your question, the root cause of my decision to leave the core team is a toxic environment in the meetings themselves. The catalyst was a specific meeting last summer: after being insulted and yelled at over WebEx (not for the first time, and not just one core team member), I decided to take a break. I was able to get leadership to eventually discuss the situation with me last Fall, but after avoiding dealing with it, they made excuses, and made it clear they weren't planning to do anything about it. As such, I decided not to return. They reassure me they "want to make sure things are better for others in the future based on what we talked about" though. On Swift Evolution, my original intention was to continue participating in the forums, but after several discussions generating more heat than light, when my formal proposal review comments and concerns were ignored by the unilateral accepts, and the general challenges with transparency working with core team, I decided that my effort was triggering the same friction with the same people, and thus I was just wasting my time. I don't think my feeling is unique here, e.g. this thread includes several community members who apparently feel they don't understand the real motivation for the proposal, aren't being listened to, and reached out to me because they thought I could help. It is obvious that Swift has outgrown my influence, and some of the design premises I care about (e.g. "simple things that compose") don't seem in vogue any more. Equally obvious, I have many other interests than Swift, and no shortage of things to spend my time on. I am the sort of person who is always looking ahead, so while this situation is sad, I moved on and am definitely a lot happier not having to deal with it! --------------------------------------------------------------------- Swift has a ton of well meaning and super talented people involved in and driving it. They are trying to be doing the best they can with a complicated situation and many pressures (including lofty goals, fixed schedules, deep bug queues to clear, internal folks that want to review/design things before the public has access to them, and pressures outside their team) that induce odd interactions with the community. By the time things get out to us, the plans are already very far along and sometimes the individuals are attached to the designs they've put a lot of energy into. This leads to a challenging dynamic for everyone involved. I think that Swift is a phenomenal language and has a long and successful future ahead, but it certainly isn't a community designed language, and this isn't ambiguous. The new ideas on how to improve things sounds promising - I hope they address the fundamental incentive system challenges that the engineers/leaders face that cause the symptoms we see. I think that a healthy and inclusive community will continue to benefit the design and evolution of Swift. -Chris 95 Likes [Pitch 2] Light-weight same-type requirement syntax [Pitch 2] Light-weight same-type requirement syntax lijh (lijh) February 21, 2022, 1:58pm #8 But you can always fork and make a version of Swift language of your own legally, right? johannesweiss (Johannes Weiss) February 21, 2022, 2:52pm #9 Hi @Chris_Lattner3, I wanted to thank you for everything you did for Swift and its community. Your contributions are outstanding and invaluable. 40 Likes nikitamounier (Nikita Mounier) February 21, 2022, 4:41pm #10 # tkremenek: In the coming weeks, we hope to introduce a new language workgroup that will focus on the core of the language evolution itself, splitting off this responsibility from the core steering of the project. This is great! It's an important step in the evolution of Swift as a language as it matures. It would be great to see influential library maintainers play a bigger role in language evolution as they are confronted with the day-to-day hurdles of API design outside Swift's core libraries. I hope this stronger position of influence will give even more incentive to create high-quality maintained libraries as the ecosystem expands. 4 Likes * Home * Categories * FAQ/Guidelines * Terms of Service * Privacy Policy Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled Terms of Service Privacy Policy Cookie Policy