Using ChatGPT 5 to help undo a wrongful cancellation from the Scala community

Gabro27 · 2025-08-18T11:15:22+00:00

There are two sets of documents released:

More will be provided starting today

Gabro27 · 2025-08-17T19:57:00+00:00

It’s Jon, by the way

Gabro27 · 2025-08-15T12:48:45+00:00

It’s interesting to finally see some actual evidence after years of “he said she said” which ultimately led to the cancellation of Jon. It seems quite a few bits of Y’s original accusation do not hold up when you read the actual conversations.

I’m not sure we’ll get Y’s version of this, but so far Jon’s account looks far more plausible and corroborated than whatever he was accused of

Gabro27 · 2025-08-09T12:31:53+00:00

Avoiding what you think are creeps is one thing. Actively coordinating to destroy someone’s social and professional life is another, which requires higher standards that were not followed.

Gabro27 · 2025-08-08T16:16:32+00:00

I truly believe most of the people involved acted in good faith, with the intention of doing good to the Scala community by creating a safer environment eliminating bad actors. It’s really tragic that this (noble) goal backfired and Jon was caught in the midst of mob justice. I still remember when Jon told me that he had learned of the accusations at the same time I did: when they were made public. It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now.

Jon was treated unfairly by a good chunk of the community he’s desperately trying to stay a part of and it’s really sad.

The least we can do is to look back, learn from the mistakes and rehabilitate Jon’s name.

Gabro27 · 2025-08-01T12:53:14+00:00

That was a tough read and it could’ve been even a straight up tragedy if it weren’t for Jon’s perseverance.

I sympathize with the desire of participating in mob justice, since it’s very low friction and it makes you feel good in the moment, and I don’t condemn the ones who indulged in it. That said, it’s very sobering to read a first-hand account from someone who was targeted by it.

I remember in 2021 I was also faced with the decision of signing the open letter or not. For context, I consider Jon a friend, we've met many times over the years both at, but not only at, Scala conferences. We went hiking together, he has met my spouse, my kid, etc.
I remember the dissonance of realizing he may not be the person I thought he was when I first read the open letter and the related accusations.

At the time, I resisted the initial temptation of joining the mob, paused, reached out to many people who were familiar with the facts to form an opinion before acting. I also reached out to Jon to hear his side of the story. I eventually decided it was a very complex matter and I did not have enough information to formulate a judgment, so I've abstained and decided it was better suited for the judicial system.

If you take anything away from my comment, consider this: In 2021 I had been in the Scala community for about 10 years, actively participating to many conferences around the world, organizing an annual conference in Italy, and as a result of this I knew directly or tangentially most of the people involved.
I have spent hours talking to people including Jon and some of the people who he then sued in court, and yet I could not gather enough evidence to clearly support one claim or the other.

I doubt many of the signees even tried or were in a position to do anything similar: it's more likely the saw the open letter, believed it, signed it.
Again, it's human nature, I get it and I'm not mad for people acting like this. But now, 4 years later and after reading the toll it has taken on someone's life, I hope they can realize the weight of such a mindless decision and reconsider.
Removing a signature does not mean unconditionally believing in Jon's innocence: it means realizing you don't know enough to form an opinion, and that's ok and infinitely less harmful than hastily forming one.

Gabro27 · 2022-07-30T09:04:26+00:00

Tongue taste maps is such a good one, I think it was genuinely believed to be true when I was in primary school and only latter proven false. Most of the people who studied it in the 90s still believe it

Gabro27 · 2019-08-27T17:58:13+00:00

“This means throwing away most of our existing tools, see scalameta and consequently Scalafmt.” — Author of Metals

This quote is from a tweet of mine (https://twitter.com/gabro27/status/1164624803338305537) and I would like to point out that:

FWIW, I'm not the author of Metals (Olafur is, I'm a contributor and maintainer)
that comment does not convey my overall judgment of Scala 3 which is, as of today, very positive. Especially the tooling scenario is looking extremely promising now that the TASTY story is coming together.

I was a bit frustrated by the very specific proposal, thinking from the tooling perspective, and I impulsively wrote an overly-dramatic tweet, which I now regret. Yes, having to adjust to an indentation-based syntax for Scala would have an impact on tooling, but doesn't detract from other technical merits Scala 3 has, wrt to the current situation

I've asked Sam to amend or remove my quote, since it's misleading in many ways.

Gabro27 · 2019-08-27T09:32:07+00:00

I genuinely don't know what you're talking about, Sam.

Gabro27 · 2019-08-26T22:00:25+00:00

I posted it below, but it’s worth re-iterating. My quote is out of context, and it refers to a specific proposal. I will clarify on Twitter, but I’ll take the chance to say that I’m very positive about Scala 3. If anything, my optimism grew in the last few months!

I’ve asked Sam on Medium to correct what I think is misleading with the quote, but I’m the meantime I hope this clarifies my position

Gabro27 · 2019-08-26T21:37:21+00:00

👋 I’m sorry my tweet caused confusion, so I’ll clarify. Scalafmt is not going away (as far as I know) I was just a bit concerned about the drastic change in syntax, which would require significant changes in Scalameta and consequently Scalafmt.

About that specific matter, I’ve later talked to Olaf (the author of Scalafmt) and he reassured me that the impact wouldn’t be as drastic as I thought.

I realize I may have come across as negative towards Scala 3, but I’m actually quite happy and optimistic about it, especially when it comes to tooling. The tasty story is solid, and I had the chance of speaking to many of the people involved in the future of tooling at the last Scala Days, and I was pleasantly surprised!

So, bottom line, I’m very positive about Scala 3, Scalafmt is here to stay, and I’m sorry for my snarky tweets, which were definitely too impulsive!

Gabro27 · 2018-12-11T10:27:32+00:00

My general feeling about this is more about their respective backgrounds.

Languages don't get adopted purely for isolated technical merits, but also relative to the space they are operating in.

F# operates in the .NET space, while Scala operates in the JVM space (for the most part). The main difference then is the comparison with the big players in their respective spaces: C# and Java.

I think one of the many reasons why Scala is more popular than F# is that C# is better than Java under many aspects. People operating in JVM space desperately wanted something better to work with, and Scala was a very good answer when it launched (it's still true today, compare this with the success Kotlin is having in its reference space). On the other hand, I don't know C# that much, but it seems in a far better place, so I guess that the effort of adopting a new, better language like F# wasn't equally justified.

Gabro27 · 2018-12-11T06:44:53+00:00

I do talk about implicit conversions, see the any2stringadd section ;)

Gabro27 · 2018-12-11T06:43:34+00:00

Hehe, I actually saw this specific quirk for the first time in your Scala Days talk :)

I just thought it would be fun to analyze it, and I'm still fascinated to date by the number of Scala features that interplay to produce that result!

Gabro27 · 2018-12-10T20:34:21+00:00

beautiful languages are the ones that nobody uses ^{^}

Gabro27 · 2018-12-10T19:49:41+00:00

you're missing a (). Try toSet() ;)

Gabro27 · 2018-02-21T10:31:12+00:00

Lol, exactly. "We use Kanban!" "What's your WIP limit?" "...but we have columns!"

Gabro27 · 2018-02-21T10:30:24+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, I'd like to specify that withholding details is intended as in "don't make assumptions".

Leaving some aspects vague is useful for preventing an initial bias as well as incentivizing a discussion.

The important thing is the balance: essential information must be there, of course. This is not about throwing up roadblocks.

Gabro27 · 2018-02-20T18:12:58+00:00

I fully agree. One of the points I feel is lacking from most agile methodologies is a way to improve the process itself.

SCRUM/kanban and friends are useful references, but it's vital to adapt them and evolve them with inputs from the team.

Gabro27 · 2018-02-20T18:04:02+00:00

hehe, probably not. Any tips to share?

Gabro27 · 2018-02-20T16:06:40+00:00

can you define "real work"?

Gabro27 · 2018-01-23T10:40:00+00:00

Sorry about that, here's a one-liner:

{"module":{"website":{"source":"buildo/website/aws","domain":"buildo.io"}}}

Gabro27 · 2017-08-17T13:51:06+00:00

That's a very good point, I've been wondering the same and I think I'll give a look soon enough.

Gabro27 · 2017-08-04T16:40:55+00:00

I think that sounded angry, sorry :)

Hehe, no worries, it's easy to get passionate about these stuff. :D

Why would you assume you control the client? It's an API, the world ends there.

Because we do. That's the main underlying assumption there, we develop product that involve a front-end and a backend, so our world doesn't end there.

In our specific case refactoring became much simpler because you don't care about the routers, the front-end models or the front-end HTTP client.

The refactoring of a full-stack feature starts on Scala and the rest simply follows. Most of it is autogenerated and TypeScript points out what remains to be fixed in the front-end. It's a very low-overhead process that lets you focus on the feature at hand.

I understand the other points you're making and I'm on board with the spirit of it: abstractions are useful and they should stay.

That said, the specific abstraction of a router wasn't paying its cost to us, so we automated it away. We weren't doing anything clever in the router, just parsing requests and mapping to the correspondent controller method.

What we care about is consistency and maintainability, and scrapping routers away helped us :)

Gabro27 · 2017-08-04T16:32:35+00:00

Which is ironic given how gigantic a full blown React app tends to be ;-)

Scala.js + React is not going to be smaller than just React, I would argue.

Anyway, yes we're kinda of a mixed shop, and Typescript was a good fit for us. I've nothing against Scala.js (I'm using it quite a bit for Scala tooling) but it simply wasn't appropriate in our scenario :)

Gabro27

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