Seems like there might be some other confounding factors here:

- A language that is simply less active or whose users feel less ability to have a say in the language's development is going to be both less social and less dramatic, but also carries a high chance that existing users are only there for legacy reasons and are always considering moving to another language better suited for their purposes.

- A language run by a corporation is less "social," and has the drama play out in business negotiations, closed-door committee meetings, and lawsuits instead of on blogs and public mailing lists and (in this case) closed-door meetings with an expectation of public reporting.

I'm not aware of any drama in the ASP community, but that probably also had something to do with many users having picked Python for their next project instead of ASP. I'm aware of some drama in the Clojure community, the conclusion of which seems to have been that Clojure is their corporate sponsor's language and if it doesn't work for you you should find something else.

It's one of the things I really like about the R community. It's incredibly friendly and without egos, and has lots of people who actively work to make the community as safe and welcoming for everybody. I can't say I've ever heard about drama like this from there.

R is one of the few languages that I actually use a little bit, yet know absolutely nothing of the community and history. I mean I could tell you all about a dozen niche languages from Lisp to Haskell, but nothing of this masterpiece. Time to go read up on R :).

Any chance you could give a short little blurb for how the community is organized and works? I'm curious how different it is to Python. I also sometimes worry about the future of R where you have Python-Pandas coupled with Spyder IDE and Julia-DataFrame library with Atom-Juno as IDE as well as JuliaDB. It seems like a lot of communities are moving in on what R does best.