I don’t think you’re missing anything. I didn’t like the first episode as I found the humor somewhat jarring, and didn’t like Mariner. I kept at it as a show I watch while exercising, though, and it grew on me. While Mariner still annoys me at times, there’s a warmth and enthusiasm in LD that is quite infectious. I think they do a great job at teasing Trek while still loving it, and I am there for it.
The stress of those moments left a weird impression. I’m very against splitting the party now when entering checkout territory.
Agree with many of the other comments here saying that they’d be very wary of such a project based on what these choices say about the project’s maintainers. Something else is that while I have real affection for email and particularly IRC based on past experience, I don’t think these two are without problems. Email is so asynchronous that many folks feel obligated to treat writing messages to a list more formally. This is not totally misguided since everyone subscribed gets this message delivered to them. IRC, on the other hand, is so synchronous that you should reasonably worry if anyone will be there to talk with, and about whether or not there are searchable archives.
Something (like GitHub) that can be quick but is also perfectly serviceable for asynchronous communication really does have advantages, imho.
It really is interesting how async Rust takes the shine off of Rust to such an extent. If good old stack based, single threaded Rust wasn’t so polished, I don’t think the async parts would stand out so much. Something that might help is to have some sort of benchmark showing that Arcing through an async problem is still faster than typical GCed languages.
I also started my FP journey with untyped languages. Finding Haskell changed my perspective because it answered questions I hadn’t yet been able to clearly articulate to myself.
That said, I do sympathize with the criticism that static types can make some things harder to use. I think it’s because we’re not yet doing everything right, but the reality is that some, say, Python APIs are faster to get going with than comparable things in Haskell.
I’ve had the typical disasters with partition tables and boot loader mixups, but the one I keep coming back to is updating my Nvidia drivers too eagerly. Whether something gets messed up with an external monitor, or the laptop starts resisting switching away from the integrated GPU, or an electron app I use regularly that makes heavy use of 3D acceleration breaks, or I just need to bump the driver version in a reproducible system state record… it’s just bad news.