Re: Clojure mode

[Barry Fishman]

On 2023-09-10 03:13:30 -04, Ryan Tate wrote:
> It’s not ok to behave the way your founder has and then punish people
> for calling it out. I’m not particularly active on this list, and I
> won’t personally suffer much if you block me, but my language
> throughout this has been measured and it speaks poorly of fsf’s values
> for you to bully me for speaking out respectfully.
>
>>> 
>> 
>> You are welcome, but please tone down your posts about this.
>
> I stand by what I’ve written. Reflect and do better! Have a good
> weekend.

I find it remarkable the someone can claim ethical rights to a symbol
name in an Emacs name-space solely because they used it first in a
useful package.  Especially such a name as closure-mode which is the
obvious name for a Closure language mode.

You seem to claim that somehow the Emacs developers are now ethically
forbidden to make changes that they feel provide improvements in a
project they have taken the responsibility to maintain, because
someone on the internet has chosen to add an unsolicited extension, and
make it available.

Personally, as primarily a Emacs user, I find it inconvenient to have my
own additions and selected extensions cause Emacs to break for me,
due to some change made in Emacs or a package I download and use.

I may even complain about it.  But the idea that I had some standing
as far as having my rights violated seems absurd.

May newer projects have name-spaces, and have some registration process
for users or projects defining their own unique name-spaces in which
they can add their modules.  Often that is a DNS registration they own.
My Closure mode would be org.ecubist:closure-mode. Things could then be
shorten in their code by using some import/export language facility.

In Emacs there seems to be a practice of prefixing a common term in a
symbol with some likely unique prefix such as their initials and a
slash.  My own local Closure mode I might call bf/closure-mode. 
At least then, if there is a conflict (with somebody who's initials are
also "BF"), I could find the code to be changed with a regex.

Either way, it seems to be reasonable to expect some name change
discussion when a mode is formally added into Emacs.  And the
initial choice of an obvious name for some externally distributed
package brings with it an expectation of some future conflict.  And in
that conflict the defense that you used the symbol first would not be
very persuasive.

-- 
Barry Fishman