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Rookies in the Bike Shed

david.heinemeierhansson.com

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Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed

#41

Post by Cushman »

aeturnum wrote: post #40
Cushman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the only objective read of this. There were a couple of good reasons to make the change, a couple of bad reasons to, and no reasons not to. The discussion fixated on the bad reasons early on, it became a matter of principle on both sides, and thus the change was not made despite the good reasons. It's not bikeshedding, but there ought to be a name for that.

My read of the article is that "bikeshedding" generally covers discussions in which the energy expended vastly outweighs the gravity of the topic under discussion. There can be a correct answer to, "what color should we paint the bike shed?" (or, at least, many incorrect answers). The fact that one side might be correct (or more correct) than the other does not justify the effort. The point of the article, as I read…

I think the point we're making is that most of the people arguing over that PR didn't have a strong opinion about the feature itself, but were irritated by the weirdly philosophical reason for rejecting it. (I don't care what color you paint your bike shed, but if your local government says you can't paint it green because that's surrendering to the plants, I'm likely to have an opinion about that.)

Obviously at some point (and the earlier the better) you still need to to throw up your hands and walk away, but I'd say pig wrestling is the better metaphor here.

Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed

#42

Post by nateware »

fxn wrote: post #33
chc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to be harsh, but just to give some perspective: You really come across as stubborn and intractable there. Your rationale basically boils down to "People might think I was wrong if we change this." The reason given is not anything like "The code I am reverting is inferior," it's just "This code doesn't support the point I want to make." You even said that if his commit message had been different — not the code,…

I can only say you basically have no idea what you are talking about. I know my motivations, you can't read my mind chc.

Yes, good point - all the more reason to be mindful of the impressions you make on others, since their perception is their reality.

Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed

#43

Post by lucisferre »

lucisferre wrote: post #4
jashkenas wrote: post #2

The Rails commit that spurred this post, apparently: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/5329

Bah, I can't be bothered to read the whole thing. Before the request was closed, if I understood correctly, the argument was about whether or not `xhr?` needed to return a boolean rather than what it's doing which is aliasing a regex match. Hmm, call it bike-shedding if you want, but I have to be honest part of the beauty and value of Ruby is how semantic it can be made when you follow some conventions. How hard or a…

Just wanted to note, I had a chance to read the closed pull request from later and then this post (http://blog.leshill.org/blog/2012/03/25/a-question-of-truth....) and I see the point being made, which is not against the change, but in defence of not making an unneeded one.

So my understanding of the situation was poor. But then I am, admittedly, a bike shedding rookie.

However, and this is just my opinion, I still feel as though calling out everyone (there was a good number of people involved including @tpope) as rookies and accusing them of bike shedding, seemed like, well, poor taste, and unhelpful.

Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed

#44

Post by bratsche »

fxn wrote: post #39
chc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, and I'm sorry if it sounded that way. I was speaking from the perspective of interacting with other people, not your inner thoughts. You might actually have had very good reasons why your choice was superior, but you did not share them with anyone else, and from an impartial observer's perspective, it looks like this stonewalling is what made a simple PR turn into a huge bikeshedding flamefest. If this…

If that was the intention I appreciate it. Yes it matters to me, but up to a point. I cannot do things in my life seeking approval or saying yes to some people when I am convinced the answer is no. Also, saying no, and not applying the PR the way I did, with the rationales and respect I showed, should not be taken as an offense. People just get upset when they see the red label "Closed". On the other hand, for every…

It's more than that though. It seemed really clear that a lot of people thought this was useful, and you blew off all objections without really explaining sufficiently why. It's not that big of a deal, and it sucks that everyone wasted so much time on it, but the thing that bothers me about it is that I (and it sounds like a number of other people) have come away from this still not understanding why the change is rejected. We understand what you wrote about predicates not guaranteeing a boolean, but your attitude kind of implied that predicates should not return a boolean and, clearly, a number of people don't understand why that makes sense.

What you failed to address was why your way was better than returning a boolean true/false. Everyone understood your comments that predicates don't necessarily need to return those, but your comments kind of read like "my way is perfectly valid Ruby" while the other people's perspective seemed to be "our way is perfectly valid Ruby also, and it alleviates some potential annoyances or pitfalls". You never really addressed any of that, it always seemed to just go back to "my way is valid Ruby".

Maybe this wasn't really your intention, but it honestly seemed as though you were deliberately trying to frustrate people. I think that's why there was so much push-back (in the form of about three other PRs being opened). Not because people felt so strongly about xhr?, but because it just seemed like you were just rejecting everyone's opinions without really expressing why returning true/false is worse than returning 0/nil.

I'm basically a total outsider since I haven't contributed to Rails yet, so feel free to completely ignore my perspective.

Re: Rookies in the Bike Shed

#45

Post by [deleted] »

fxn wrote: post #39
chc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, and I'm sorry if it sounded that way. I was speaking from the perspective of interacting with other people, not your inner thoughts. You might actually have had very good reasons why your choice was superior, but you did not share them with anyone else, and from an impartial observer's perspective, it looks like this stonewalling is what made a simple PR turn into a huge bikeshedding flamefest. If this…

If that was the intention I appreciate it. Yes it matters to me, but up to a point. I cannot do things in my life seeking approval or saying yes to some people when I am convinced the answer is no. Also, saying no, and not applying the PR the way I did, with the rationales and respect I showed, should not be taken as an offense. People just get upset when they see the red label "Closed". On the other hand, for every…

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