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You say it like it's a bad thing. I guess it's a bias to be aware of so the community can try to compensate, but there's really no other way. Power goes to those who are contributing. If I'm building an open-source compiler I'd love to give power to the world renowned experts on compilers, but unfortunately they are not participating.


If you're building something that has a big community and sees a lot of use, you've got a lot of different stakeholders with different needs. The folks contributing to the compiler, language, standard library, or build system directly are not your only stakeholders, nor are they your only contributors.

Successful languages don't become successful without a rich ecosystem behind them. The people responsible for those projects are probably more important to your continued success than anyone contributing to the language itself.

What processes you have makes a huge difference in terms of who you give power to. If you have formal processes that ensure that folks have time to weigh in on things, and you make it easy to follow what's going on (signal-to-noise ratio is important here!), you can get much more relevant feedback from a much larger and more important group of stakeholders than if you handle things in a noisy, fast-moving zulip.




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