I’ve been thinking about this thread over the past day and I keep coming back to the same question. Are we as a community sure that this goal is aligned with the Scala Center’s goal of “Substantially grow our community of open source contributors.”? As an open-source contributor who would like to contribute even more SBT has consistently been one of my biggest impediments to contributing further. This feel like asking people what they want and hearing a faster horse. Sure, if you pool a group of scala developers who use SBT and ask, do you need help using SBT to do basic tasks you will hear 80% of them say “Yes, please help me” but I would love for the Scala-Center to take a longer term view and ask if 80% of experienced scala developers cannot accomplish their goals with a tool, maybe we need more than improving it’s compilation time?
If your problem is
Sub-par performance.
Learning and using sbt is difficult.
Lack of community involvement.
And it consistently resolves around SBT, then maybe more SBT is not the answer. Or at least not in it’s current incarnation. I honestly believe learning how the sausage is made is not going to make more people want to contribute to SBT, or to Scala in general, so I am not trolling here, I just don’t share the belief that educating people on what I see as a failed design experiment in Scala is the best thing we can do to encourage adoption and I would prefer to see a few people take a step back, pretend they had never heard of existing solutions, ask users what they would like to accomplish, and see if they still believe educating them on the design philosophy behind sbt is the correct solution.
I also am not a fan of the idea of the Scala-Center teaching design practices that we as a community no longer support. Do we really want newcomers to learn about using macros and DSLs that don’t behave like regular scala as soon as they pick up Scala. It’s almost polar opposite of teaching Scala - The Simple Parts. I would much rather have Scala-Center teach beginners http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/06/25/keeping-scala-simple.html than how macros work.