paul santa clara on 4 Jun 2010 02:10:05 -0700


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Re: Philly Lambda Charter / Splintering, was Re: Scala in Philly?


It's not really any of my business what people do or don't do, so please feel free to completely disregard my opinion on the matter.  Personally, though, I would caution against setting up a group that is narrowly focused on any one of the nascent jvm languages.  As a general rule, the more esoteric and specific a group's charter, the lower it's attendance.   

If we go down the line from largest to small communities we see plentiful options for java groups, at least two .net, ... , one ruby group that is largely sustained because of rails discussions, and almost no python presence.  I suspect that a group devoted exclusively to either Clojure or Scala would see  a short spike in attendance as people came to investigate it, followed by a sharp and permanent decline.

Sorry, if i'm sounding too negative on this matter.  My intuition just tells me that all these topics are niche enough to fit under a single umbrella.

-Paul



On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:55 PM, Dan Mead <d.w.mead@gmail.com> wrote:

Tldr: splintering bad, variety of meetings good

On Jun 3, 2010 8:33 PM, "Aaron Feng" <aaron.feng@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Brian,



> Honestly, it just seemed that a group focused primarily on Scala didn't fit
> with Philly Lambda...

For some reason, the group has been more focused on Lisp than anything else.
I just checked the meeting's page (yes, I just updated :) )  and there were 6 Lisp related
meetings, and one on Scala.  Not saying the group isn't interested in Scala, in fact,
I think it's quite the opposite.  It's just in the past, people have offered to do more Lisp
presentations.  I definitely think Scala related talks would be very welcomed by the
group members.



> what's going on with
> Philly Lambda, but I thought (perhaps erroneously) that trying to shoehor...

After all, we had 6 Lisp meetings :)

A lot of people come to Philly Lambda for a break from the norm.  I believe this is why
the group has been focused on interesting and up-and-coming technologies. After the meetings
when we go to a pub, the conversation is usually centered around FP.

However, I can definitely appreciate a more focused group.

Aaro