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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

#632

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.

There is no wrong thing to do when writing tools for personal productivity, as OP clearly stated. If it works, it works. If they decide to open source it, that's great. Maybe someone has use for it. The end.

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

#633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a ton of files on github and gist, most of them are absolute crap. Honest question: Is it okay for someone else to say (without swearing or making personal jabs) in public that it is also crap? And again, to emphasize, this is a sincere question.

I don't think it's possible to answer without getting into a debate about community, morality and ethics. There's no way to distill this down to a "unit test". Will it bother me? Maybe, depends on who it is. XxHackerPants420xX's tweet of 'Columbo is teh code suxxor' wouldn't bother me as much as pg choosing to write a personal blog post titled 'ode to Columbo's shitty github account'. Is it okay? Meh. It isn't a comm…

Columbo is teh code suxxor

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

#634
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 just made a point why this 'replace' may actually be useful to do things instead of bothering with using something as needlessly complicated as you have illustrated sed.

It would be far quicker for me to write an one-use program in a number of languages than to find out how to do this in the sed oneliner style that you show - ergo, the sed approach has drawbacks in some use cases, and alternatives should be tried.

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

#635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the subtler issues I've had with piping find in a scriptis that you end up calling a program N times instead of just opening N files in the program. So if the program has overhead when loading, using a -r option instead an outer find loop can make a magnitude of difference to program operation.

Look at using find's --exec with the + ending instead of \;.

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

#636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to say it but I think his post is fair and to the point. 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'l…

> "You don't have to like that he said but he puts it in context and within the realm of Twitter - a 140 limited space of communication." This is part of why I dislike Twitter - the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision. It's a world of sound bites, and "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse" sounds wittier and has more jazz than "I…

I don't disagree with your larger point, but as an official member of the Twitter Defense Squadron (got a badge and everything):

> the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision.

This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It does both, depending on the author, and the author's mood. The solution to this problem is to not follow jerks on Twitter. Follow cool people whose tweets have wit, poetry, interesting facts, and/or links to the same.

140 characters forces only minimalism, which exaggerates any number of latent traits, good and bad.

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

#637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Insulting someone's code is like insulting someone's kid. The guy probably feels he put a lot of thought and hard work into it. It's not that hard to give constructive feedback as opposed to being an asshole.

By "the guy" do you mean "Heather"?

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

#638
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Well, the whole point is that writing sed-replacement in the language of your choice really is simpler/quicker than learning to write decent "simple shell script wrappers exposing a syntax".

Such wrappers aren't lingua franca anymore - nowadays they are as arcane and as COBOL, since [for most X] it's easier to write a perl|ruby|JS script to do X than a shell script to do X.

Starting from scratch (say, from a Win background) it might be easier to learn a language like Haskell or Scala than to learn the shellscript language with the whole pack of sed/awk/grep/etc flags and tricks.

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

#639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to say it but I think his post is fair and to the point. 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'l…

> Can we not be critical on the internet any more? You can, but why? What good is served?

Having people criticize my code on comp.lang.perl.misc in 1999 improved my programming skill (and, even more so, my Perl skill) very rapidly. However, they were saying things much more detailed than "eyes bleeding".

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

#640
post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

-1 in my regard for being a jerk. +2 for a sincere apology. A reminder that owning up to a mistake can make that mistake go away and then some.

People make mistakes all the time. If it's someone you know in person then you should probably give an apology (or vice-versa, depending on the situation). Someone has to own up because if it doesn't happen, you can end up with an ill workplace/relationship/whatever. But the internet can be a strange place. How do you apologize to strangers? With blogs? I mean, these pieces are going around being viewed by hundreds o…

There might be something like a rule of thumb that apologies should be as visible as the insult. If someone insult someone in a conversation, say sorry. If someone insult someone in front of their boss, go back and tell that you are honestly sorry. It hurts and it is why you think before you speak.
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