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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

#471

Post by michh »

serf wrote: post #291

Reverse misogyny. Had a man wrote a blog entry about crying due to 'boohoo comments' on the internet would get chastised out of the industry. A woman writes a blog entry about how her feelings get hurt and everyone with a set of swingers breaks down , puts on their big boy/high moral pants, and makes a grandiose apology (via published blog post, rather than private channels, because the fanbase must be informed lest…

Or, you know, be nice, constructive and positive and encourage people to open up their code.

Maybe someone's poorly written tool might save you a days work in the future.

Also, there's a difference between peer review and making fun of them/attacking them. If you can't see the difference, I wouldn't want to work with you.

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

#472

Post by webreac »

bruceboughton wrote: post #460
webreac wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

All I can say is I'm glad I don't work somewhere where someone writes a report on how I should get my work done at the most basic level.

It is a report on How and why I have done my work the way I did, What were the advantages and disadvantages, What could be done to improve the process.

This kind of reports are useful for people doing similar activities.

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

#473

Post by gilmeir »

readme wrote: post #265
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…

There's another reason to reinvent the wheel: $ replace "Foo" "Bar" is common sense and easy to understand. Not to mention that sed -i is a GNU extension. I haven't used replace but it seems like a pretty innocent piece of helpful code for someone who likes JS.

I agree and also I took a peek at the code and my eyes did not bleed... it's a nice little one-off that doesn't try to do too much and is written in a decent ad-hoc manner... what's wrong with that?

Heather, you've created a nice and useful tool with a modern tool-set, did a very decent job coding it and took the time to open-source it. In my eyes at least it puts you in the top 0.01% of coders in the world.

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

#474

Post by paulbjensen »

wereHamster wrote: post #226
zem wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the worst bit is that a lot of the ridicule seems motivated by the fact that it's fashionable to hate on node.js. this tweet as much as admitted it: https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/293831920872194050

Isn't it (scientifically documented) that if (a software project) A is threatened by B then supporters of A start to bash on developers and users of B? Because that's what I see here. node.js is very much a competitor to rails, and Steve Klabnik is very close to rails.

Agreed. I wrote this blog post:

http://paulbjensen.co.uk/posts/2012/07/11/thoughts-on-rails-...

Then Tony Arcieri wrote this rebuttal:

http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis...

He made some good points in his post, but the snarkiness was in my opinion a bit uncalled for. Being labelled a Rails Enthusiast when I had worked with Rails for over 4 years (2007-2011), 2 of those at New Bamboo (a big Rails agency in the UK) was cheap.

I then tried to deduce why he was so rude, so I looked through some of his older blog posts, and found this:

http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/03/why-critics-of-rails...

but then this tweet summed it all up:

http://twitter.com/bascule/status/274281490437767168

The issue I see here is that there are some in the Ruby community who hate Node, but who then extend that hatred of Node to being rude to people involved with Node.js. Tony has been rude in the past to both Substack and Isaac Schlueter (major figures in the Node community) over Twitter. I can only reason that the rudeness towards Substack was because he made this comment on his blog post: http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2012/08/debunking-nodejs-gis....

As for his replies with Isaac, see this: http://twitter.com/bascule/status/281932459719921664

I'd like to say it stops there, but it doesn't. I actually had someone email me because Tony had been rude to them on Twitter because he compared npm to Rubygems. Can you believe that?

Tony is a smart guy, he's written some really awesome software, but when it comes to Node, he is a troll.

As for Steve, he hates Node, but I don't think that he intends to be rude to Node.js people. When I posted this on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/paulbjensen/status/271691672348409856

followed by this:

http://twitter.com/paulbjensen/status/271733415580164096

and this:

http://twitter.com/paulbjensen/status/271734483538018304

Steve Klabnik followed up later on with this:

http://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/271749289154330625

Compare that to this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5018201

Both Steve Klabnik and Tom Dale retweeted that HN comment. So where Steve might hate on Node, he doesn't hate on people who like Node.js, or have expressed a preference for it (otherwise he would probably have not linked to my post).

I know I'm not the best person to say this, but I wish that this could be the end of animosity between the Ruby/Rails and Node.js communities.

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

#475

Post by brazzy »

timinman wrote: post #440
brazzy wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, it's partially Twitter's fault. Enforced brevity in a popularity contest setting encourages smartassery and discourages (or makes impossible) nuanced expression.

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

#476

Post by jrabone »

tptacek wrote: post #221
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…

I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0. Moreover, there are times when you'll want to do this stuff from within another program. What are you going to do, shell out to a find(1) pipeline? Then people like me will be giving you shit. There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in Javascript.

IMO, if you deal exclusively in shell on UNIX-alikes, you'll likely only need -print0 once in blue moon because people just don't tend to create filenames with spaces or other amusements in them. The instant you add Windows to the mix, suddenly it's the best feature ever and becomes the default for any 'find -print0 | xargs -0 ...' pipeline.

I also think that binary sized string should be the default for shells and command pipelines; plain text was great in the 60s, but it's now the 21st century and I use too many shell flavours on too many systems to remember their arcane quoting rules, locale rules, unicode bugs, etc.

Regardless, it's a shame that there's not a standard separation of UI from functionality in all these utilities - more than once I've wanted to just be able to dynamically link libsort.so from another program because writing files and exec'ing ... urgh.

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

#477

Post by Tichy »

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…

I think it can be valid to do stuff with a scripting language you know, rather than shell commands (isn't that the good old Perl philosophy?). I've actually even looked up sed once and did stuff with it, but it doesn't come up often enough to remember the gory details. And learning sed just to replace stuff takes too much time.

That said, the javascript solution does look a bit long winded.

Also, please don't take it as a negative comment on your comment, I actually appreciate the solutions and it makes me consider sed again.

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

#478

Post by Fuxy »

What's all the drama about? So what some famous people criticized your code. Get over it. They may disagree with it for whatever reason ultimately it's you who has to find the tool useful. Please don't whine about it just take it with a grain of salt they could be a million reasons they would say that.

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

#479

Post by Ecio78 »

enjo wrote: post #214
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…

I'd ague that her version is at the very least syntactically much easier to use.

i've downvoted you while i wanted to upvote you.. wtf.. i agree with you

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

#480

Post by shaurz »

webreac wrote: post #404

At my office, I would be very angry if I encounter your tool. That would mean that the guy who has brought it was too lazy to learn the proper way and makes me waste my time learning how to use a useless tool. Your tool has no advantage over standard unix tools, it is just limited to a reduced number of use cases. This kind of tools does not favour improvement of skills or good practice. I think this is the cause of…

The so-called standard unix tools are just historical artefacts, there's nothing particularly special about them other than they were the first. sed is an arcane language which in my personal opinion is not worth learning (maybe it was for you), and for all but the most trivial tasks it's probably a better idea to use a proper language like Python. After all, the whole reason for Perl's existence was that sed/awk/sh were lacking.
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