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What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

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Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#431

Post by chris_wot »

zeeg wrote: post #340
stoprock wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take it you haven't seen @zeeg's tweets on the subject, then: https://twitter.com/zeeg Sorry to disillusion you about the Python community. Personally, part of the reason I stopped using Python heavily professionally in 2007 is because I was sick of hearing and reading Python web developers regularly disparage Ruby and the "Ruby community," a tradition carried on in comments like yours to this day.

Are you suggesting I was talking bad about the Ruby community? I openly dislike Ruby (as a language), but I swear this project was written in Node, which I also dislike. Oh, and I could care less which language something is written in, my simple, trollish tweet, was only based on the usability aspect.

Yeah, about trollish tweets... you might offend someone.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#432

Post by webreac »

kamaal wrote: post #284
mrb wrote: post #200

Heather, I agree that people are unnecessarily rude to you. Don't sob. Your code shows you are already a more capable programmer than most of the ones I interview. No one has given you a clear answer as to why your code is reinventing the wheel, so allow me to do it politely. I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, m…

You have a valid point but its incomplete, allow me to explain you why we need projects like replace. You are right in telling that sewing a few utilities using pipes can emulate 'replace'. But remember you are talking about learning those 'few' utilities first. Trust me unless you have practiced your way out of these thing with hundreds of hours with experience over years its humanly impossible to remember and use a…

I have just publish a report on monday where I explain that the command line should be used instead of some small scripts that encapsulate for loops.

The argument is that basic shell knowledge should be trained in order to not lose skill (or to improve). At my work, these skills are useful when facing unexpected urgent needs.

Having a short script is a very poor benefit (simpler syntax and reduced key typing) for a big loss: - loss of knowledge - loss of understanding of what the script is doing - need to learn the name of the script which is not a reusable knowledge.

Learning the basic usage of sed, awk, shell is an investment that is quickly rewarded.

Learning all the intricacy of "replace" needs to know many javascript details and how they interact with shell escape sequences and your LOCALE configuration. I am sure it is less documented than the sed command.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#433

Post by brazzy »

chris_wot wrote: post #419
brazzy wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I ever start a company the #1 thing I will look for in others is positivity. Good luck with ever hearing about any problem before it's too late to fix it then...

Now hold on... you can, in fact, raise issues in a positive way. "Hey Larry, after I spoke yesterday I checked and we've got corruption on our RAID array... I think I can work towards resolving it, but if not then we need to come up with a mitigation plan." vs. "Larry, we've got corruption on our RAID array. I told you yesterday and you didn't work fast enough on my suggestions, so now we're all screwed. I can't beli…

Sure you can, but I suspect that if positivity is the #1 priority, you're pretty likely to see issues ignored or hand-waved away.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#434

Post by gabemart »

mrb wrote: post #408
mrb wrote: post #200

Heather, I agree that people are unnecessarily rude to you. Don't sob. Your code shows you are already a more capable programmer than most of the ones I interview. No one has given you a clear answer as to why your code is reinventing the wheel, so allow me to do it politely. I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, m…

Some of my examples can be further simplified (no -print0, no xargs), without a perf issue ("{} +" passes multiple filenames as arguments), with GNU find which is standard on Linux: replace 'var' 'let' . -r find . -type f -exec sed -ri 's,var,let,g' {} + replace 'var' 'let' . -r --include="*.js" find . -type f -name '*.js' -exec sed -ri 's,var,let,g' {} + replace 'var' 'let' . -r --exclude="*.min.js,*.py" find . -typ…

>To all the Unix shell critics: don't try to argue that writing a 173-line js script is "simpler" than learning 3 find options (-type -name -exec), the bang(!) 'not' operator in find, and 2 sed options (-r -i).

In the context of discussing the open-sourcing of the script, the issue isn't really whether or not writing the JS is simpler than learning "3 find options", it's whether using the JS is simpler than learning "3 find options".

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#435

Post by mrb »

acqq wrote: post #430
mrb wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are wrong about #1: her design goal was use from the command line (according to her readme), not from node.js. You are wrong about #2 too: I have said this 5 times already: you can write a very short (much shorter than 173 lines of js) a wrapper shell script exposing an interface as easy as "replace". Please read what I wrote!

Even if she designed it to be used from the command line, and this is still not the only possible use of the JavaScript code which she open sourced, she had one more reason: sed doesn't have JavaScript regexps. Anybody who really wants to use JavaScript regexps doesn't have other choice but to use her tool. Now you can say that you don't need that, but you still has to admit that others may. So you're still wrong.

With all due respect, you add nothing to the discussion, I already acknowledged this in my OP:

"There is only one case that justifies reimplementing things: if your tool has the requirement of supporting the exact js regex syntax..."

(Please read what I wrote, really!)

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#436

Post by simonh »

anthonyb wrote: post #163
shardling wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yelling at someone you're in an argument with is a world away from picking on a stranger. (It's not necessarily good , but it is categorically different behavior.)

Dressing down someone like that on a public mailing list is absolutely picking on them. It's not an argument, and is basically no different to the behaviour here.

If someone brings up their child in a way I think is wrong I may disapprove, but it would be wrong of me to be abusive about it. If someone deliberately hurts my child and then makes excuses, I may very well end up serving 10 years to life for what I do to them.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#437

Post by vidarh »

doktrin wrote: post #249
mrb wrote: post #200

Heather, I agree that people are unnecessarily rude to you. Don't sob. Your code shows you are already a more capable programmer than most of the ones I interview. No one has given you a clear answer as to why your code is reinventing the wheel, so allow me to do it politely. I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, m…

Honestly, I think you ended up really making the case for replace. The nix CLI examples are convoluted at best. I've used CLI tools for years, and it would probably take me 5-10 minutes of scanning the man pages to reproduce all but the simplest of those snippets. Granted, this boils down to the sporadic use-case, but that's the entire point. The replace examples are all clean. It would mean I would not be juggling l…

I agree. I've used Linux for 18 years, and I'm comfortable with all the find and xargs use. But sed is too obnoxious. Beyond the extremely trivial, I'd do stuff in Ruby instead rather than bother with scouring the sed documentation to figure out what I need.

I might have an issue with doing a replacement in JS for node, though. But for those who are already using node, why not.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#438

Post by chris_wot »

huhtenberg wrote: post #406
doktrin wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. Once I read the names of those involved, I was a little taken aback for this very reason. Friends I respect think quite highly of Corey, for instance. Also worth noting, both [Steve and Corey] have published apologies on their own blogs. Both are worth reading.

How nice of them. Makes you wonder how many apologies are outstanding.

Only one, from @zeeg.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#439

Post by chris_wot »

brazzy wrote: post #433
chris_wot wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now hold on... you can, in fact, raise issues in a positive way. "Hey Larry, after I spoke yesterday I checked and we've got corruption on our RAID array... I think I can work towards resolving it, but if not then we need to come up with a mitigation plan." vs. "Larry, we've got corruption on our RAID array. I told you yesterday and you didn't work fast enough on my suggestions, so now we're all screwed. I can't beli…

Sure you can, but I suspect that if positivity is the #1 priority, you're pretty likely to see issues ignored or hand-waved away.

No more so than if you were extremely negative and played the blame game. Ignoring issues is not what I'd call positive though. That's just delusion.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#440

Post by timinman »

brazzy wrote: post #377
cachvico wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the other apology, http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2013-01-23-node Heather, don't take it personally - your code is fine! JavaScript, on the other hand, is a wounded warrior by now..

My takeaway: "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."

It's certainly not Twitter's fault. Lately, the open source community's underbelly has been exposed.

"But open source is right and we are the good guys?!", or... "But I know those guys and they are usually really cool!"

We want to categorize people as being bad or good, and it messes with our brain when we think we may have to re-categorize. It's more useful to realize that we all have a capacity to do both good and harm. It's also more useful to judge ourselves than others. Recognizing the need to change is the beginning. I know that I need Outside help to maximize the good and minimize the bad that I am capable of.

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