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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

#561

Post by calinet6 »

xentronium wrote: post #547
calinet6 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bound to be an unpopular opinion, but why exactly does anyone have to apologize? He's absolutely right. Criticism comes from every corner, especially in the software world. 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…

> You have to join the discussion like an adult You don't start "discussion" with "how to make sed and grep worse", you just don't. She (harthur) even attempted to get some real feedback out of the snarky twitter mob, but it turns out that "nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding" .

Yes, I've better familiarized myself with the situation, and the people in question are, in fact, assholes, and the discussion was not productive. Sorry for ranting on a slightly-related tangent...

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

#562

Post by barkingcat »

lobotryas wrote: post #421
confluence wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write complex vector math in C from memory - doesn't mean everyone needs to be able to do it. That replace library does what it's supposed to do - it replaces shit easily. Don't like it - don't use it. If people want to do more - then they'll figure it out for themselves. For everyone who already knows more - eat some humble cake.

>Don't like it - don't use it. This is a false dilemma and completely misses the point. The replace library was written by a person who either never heard of or never learned how to use SED. Just because they created their own hack as a workaround doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

If you take a look at the readme, the first commit back in 2011 says this:

"It's similar to sed but there are a few differences:" and then goes along to list out the differences.

I would expect this person to 1) have heard of and 2) have learned to use sed in order to write a tool that is similar but has slight differences in syntax to sed.

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

#563

Post by potatolicious »

brazzy wrote: post #525
huhtenberg wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot even make this stuff up: You are clearly well versed in this subject. So, how would you attribute this remark?

Twitter; you don't have space for detailed (and possibly constructive) criticism, you substitute witticisms because that's what gets retweeted (i.e. what the environment rewards). Maybe you read another snarky tweet just before and want to one-up it. Maybe you just worked on some messy code and are a bit frustrated and this looked like the right place to vent. Off-hand snarkiness can be pretty mean, but that doesn't…

Indeed, and thanks for explaining it better than I ever could.

People are treating "being an asshole" like an exceptional state of being, when in reality we're all assholes to someone sometimes. To pretend that some people are just intrinsically assholes, and everyone else is incapable of it, is a pretty surefire way to end up being the next asshole.

The reality is that snarky, flippant comments are easy, and it demands a level of self awareness to not engage in it. Recognizing your own ability to be an asshole is part of that.

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

#564

Post by kenneth_reitz »

calinet6 wrote: post #535
nollidge wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's David Cramer's notpology: http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet...

This is bound to be an unpopular opinion, but why exactly does anyone have to apologize? He's absolutely right. Criticism comes from every corner, especially in the software world. 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…

Constructive criticism should always be welcome.

These comments weren't constructive, by any means.

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

#565

Post by Dylan16807 »

dos1 wrote: post #537
Dylan16807 wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry what? If you even consider saying that code is like an existing project but not good, or implying that a piece of code is badly written, you're an asshole!? Don't you think you're taking this a bit far?

He didn't merely say the project "wasn't good", he implied it in a snarky, very unconstructive way. 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…

It shouldn't matter if it's unconstructive. He's not talking to the author of the code. I still don't see how being snarky, or god forbid considering being snarky, makes you an asshole. It's just some code; he's not insulting anybody.

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

#566

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

readme wrote: post #124
protomyth wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't really know. I did get turned down for an internship because my high school was in the same area code as the college I went to (whole state is one area code). I really did want to work there.

I hope the keyword is 'did' -- if the hiring process is that robotic and stupid imagine the rest.

It's not always that simple. In a big enough organization, there can easily be good parts and bad parts, with the bad parts worth tolerating, especially if the bad part is just an upfront cost like a dumb hiring process. I might put up with some annoying corporate HR crap if it meant I could work at someplace like Xerox PARC in its heyday.

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

#567

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

arcatek wrote: post #55
manicdee wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tool is simpler than sed because it misses a lot of stuff that sed actually does. That's what you and the people mocking this project have missed. Well, there's also the old idea of "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it." Or the idea of constructive criticism. Or the idea of contributing useful patches to the project. So yes, there is something you and the armchair experts missed: software doesn't…

I see your point, but I slightly disagree. It could be worthy to kindly say that there is a 'standard' way to do it, since the author may not be aware of find or sed. And if they are, some readers may not.

She mentions sed in the readme. She knows about it, and has informed potential users as well.

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

#568

Post by [deleted] »

scott_w wrote: post #513
mrb wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then take the 5-10 minutes to scan the man pages. Write a simple shell script wrapper exposing a syntax as simple as "replace". And be done with it in 15 minutes top. It seems to me that writing all this js code would take a lot longer than 15 min.

The issue is that it's 5-10 minutes to scan each man page every single time I want to use sed, find, xargs, etc. I quickly reach a point where I just think "Fuck it, I'm writing a Python script for this." A simple tool that only takes a couple of minutes to learn, then a five second look at the man page to refresh the syntax is very valuable, particularly if it focuses on doing the one job that people want to do most…

[deleted]

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

#569

Post by Xcelerate »

A tool like "replace" is actually very useful for someone like me.

Within the past year I've been learning OS X and the associated Unix environment (coming from a Windows background). At times I wonder how to do find/replace in the command line. So I look at sed. Glance over the man page -- what the heck? Google it; okay's so there's apparently different versions of sed, and OS X has something weird with -i since it's BSD sed instead of GNU sed... and oh look! It uses a different type of regular expressions than I've been using for the past 10 years. And, oh crap, I just accidentally overwrote my file because I typed in the command wrong.

The alternative for me is to open the Coffee REPL and get that crap done in seconds.

Yeah, I'm slowly picking up the Unix skillset (and Vim is invaluable after finally getting around to learning it), but I think people forget the sheer amount of memorization involved to navigate in a Unix environment.

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

#570

Post by calinet6 »

pc86 wrote: post #559
calinet6 wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bound to be an unpopular opinion, but why exactly does anyone have to apologize? He's absolutely right. Criticism comes from every corner, especially in the software world. 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…

> Code is never personal. Whatever I say about your code has nothing to do with you. I've heard this repeated ad nauseum (not just in this thread) and I think it's total crap. You cannot tell me that if you spend dozens of hours writing something then someone comes along and goes line by line telling you how what you wrote is an abomination that you're not going to have an emotional response. If that's the case it ha…

Of course. I do too, it's only human. You gotta be tactful, and you gotta be nice. It's more striving for an ideal state of zen when accepting criticism than anything. Not always realistic, but it's virtuous.
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