Discourse vs. GitHub for discussing internals

The category “Internals & Design” of Julia’s Discourse is announced as a place for “Discussion of the development of Julia itself: language design, implementation and standard library”. This is of course right, but I think that it may create the expectation (wrong in my opinion) of that category’s being a place not mainly for open questions, but also for specific issues and feature requests that rather belong in the GitHub repo.

The “about” post of that category gives a clearer message:

That message is pinned, but by default that’s only for the first time you visit the category. Maybe that could also be briefly mentioned in the presentation paragraph of the category, which everybody can read all the time in the front page of Discourse?

Increasing the awareness on the importance of GitHub for those discussions might be good to reduce the friction that arises from time to time, when some people feel that some design decisions have not been sufficiently exposed and discussed within the Julia Community - although they have been thoroughly discussed in one or various GitHub issues or PR for months. And would also reduce the opposite (albeit less frequent) complaint: that discussions about some feature get scattered in multiple places, when it would be much more efficient to concentrate them in a relevant GitHub issue.

2 Likes

I think it is fine asking in that category before opening an issue, if it is really about internals. Open-ended and speculative issues may benefit from some preliminary discussion.

6 Likes