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

You don't have to like what he said but he puts it in context and within the realm of Twitter - a 140 limited space of communication.

His original tweet was "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?".

Really. Can we not be critical on the internet any more?

And here is EVERYONE saying worse things about him in the comments!?

Go look in the mirror people. I'll take the downvotes.

[updated: typos]

Your code stands for itself. Simple as that.

And I tell this to almost every programmer I work with at some point or another. If they have an emotional response to a code review, or criticism of any kind—"Code is never personal. Whatever I say about your code has nothing to do with you. All I want is for us to improve this together, and we do that by exchanging ideas."

Criticisms are never directed at people, they are never intended to be personal attacks—they are simply evaluations of quality, and we're all trying to achieve higher quality. When you put code out there, you open it up to response. If people decide that it's good, then great; if people decide that it's bad, then great! You have an opportunity to improve it. That is a godsend. It's a million times better than if you received no feedback at all.

Male, female, good coder, bad coder, I don't care who you are: if you go sob in a corner because you receive criticism, then you're not going to improve. You have to join the discussion like an adult. Cramer may have an asshole opinion here, but sometimes assholes are right. Sometimes the world is harsh, but through adversity we can become better. Deal with it.

* Update: Well, I've read up more. These criticisms were not the productive kind, and were tactless and mean. I stand by what I said, but the people in question didn't criticize right, and they deserve the vitriol being directed at them. Shame.

Here's his quote from twitter:

>Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse? http://github.com/harthur/replace

In the world I live in, that's called being an asshole.

Look, I'm not saying these guys should apologize (in fact, if this is how they apologize it's probably best they don't), I'm simply stating that they're dicks. I know a lot of computer programmers just like them.

Edit: And I hate working with people like them. I don't care how brilliant they are, programming is a team sport in most places. If you're a jerk I don't want you on my team, no matter how many awesome sed scripts you can whip up.

My point being, I think a percentage of the trolling may come from that demographic. It's not rare to run across account that literally was set up just to hurl insults and racism. I just imagine that there are a group of 14 year olds sitting on the other side which boast to each other about how much negative Karma their 'troll' accounts have.

In other areas, I think it's that some people just take karma far too seriously. I used to spend a lot of time in the language specific learnprogramming subreddits. It seemed like a nice way to help the 'community,' without having to do the race to the answer game that you do on stackoverflow.

I learned that some of the most unbelievably childish people hang out in the language specific threads so they can play 'expert.' I ran into a couple of users that would downvote every answer in the thread that wasn't theirs. I sent one a message about reddiquette and that fact that he's really being a bit of a dick in our small community, but his response was to downvote all of my posts, and say that all other answers were wrong but his (they weren't).

Needless to say, it seemed a waste of effort to continue to post if everything was just going to be buried thanks to some guy's e-ego.