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If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

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Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#41

Post by monksy »

I think this is a matter of poor critism. There is a strong suspicion that the code isn't all that useful. It ignores the tools that are available. Its great that the person wrote it, but there are certainly better options out there. Oh well.. good on them for releasing it. Its a learning experience.

On the otherhand I think this is stating to reveal the less than stellar aspect of open community based/social projects. Not everyone agrees with you, and/or has the same opinions as you. Also, its not all free love and drugs as it was promoted to be.

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#42

Post by anon1385 »

sbank wrote: post #16

I see many comments from people saying that they are more hesitant about participating in open source after this. That they have been working on some code and will now think twice before they put it out in the open. It makes me sad. Please don't let this deter you! I know how it feels. I was literally shaking when I put my first project on GitHub. Literally. The second time too. And the third. Still am. Still scared…

I write software because I enjoy it, not to advance my career. I enjoy interacting with real users of my software, solving their real problems. Contributing to open source is not enjoyable because many of the people you have to interact with are so obnoxious, so I rarely do it. Not everybody is trying to pimp their CV.

For example today I found a memory leak in a popular open source library. There's a good chance it is installed on the computer you are using right now. It never even occurred to me to submit a bug report or patch because when I have submitted patches to this project before one was completely ignored (somebody else fixed the issue 6 months later) and the second time I got flamed (that crash causing bug still exists as far as I know).

I have about half a dozen local copies of projects related to things I'm interested in that have various improvements or fixes that will probably never be submitted back to the project, and I don't think I'm unusual in that. Most of the issues are fairly obvious and tend to get fixed eventually anyway.

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#43

Post by [deleted] »

nirvdrum wrote: post #39
[deleted] wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

This entire forum exists for the purpose of sharing fact and opinion alike. If you don't want people to share opinions (or is it just the ones that don't align with your world view?), fine, but you don't need to be an ass about it. Although part of me wonders if this is a joke, given the parallels to the situation at hand. Primarily, you clearly don't think all comments should be made public and felt the need to unhe…

[deleted]

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#44

Post by reinhardt »

up_and_up wrote: post #4

> Now, I’m all for bad projects and bad code being called out. Bullshit, sorry. Questions to ask yourself before "calling out bad code". 1. Does this code belong to someone on your team? 2. Does your code rely on this code? 3. Does the code represent a risk to you or your business in some way? 4. Do you have the direct contact info for the developer so you can appropriately, discretely and professionally inform them…

Translation: before calling out "bad code" (with or without scare quotes), run a quick cost-benefit analysis of what might cost you to speak your mind vs chuckling to yourself or sharing in private with someone. So much for claiming the moral high ground.

In any case, the first three are most likely false in this case and the fourth is just silly. Do you appropriately, discretely and professionally inform the author of every tweet, blog, or page that is wrong on the internet?

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#45

Post by benatkin »

CodeMage wrote: post #29
benatkin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the author came off as an Agile snob. Might be helpful to LivingSocial's plans (which lead nowhere BTW) but this attitude is toxic to the development community at large.

Agile? Could you elaborate on that?

To me, both this and the original complaint, come from dogmatic sentiments like "Legacy Code is Code Without Tests".

http://www.kjetilk.com/2009/02/legacy-code-is-code-without-t...

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#46

Post by FooBarWidget »

Moto7451 wrote: post #28
pbiggar wrote: post #14

Another issue in the "is Node right for this" is that it's very very portable, significantly more so that shell scripts (Mac uses BSD utilities, windows has nothing unless you have cygwin), and even slightly more portable than python.

Not sure I follow. OS X comes with the Bash shell and I have plenty of shell scripts (bash and perl) for automating my dev environment and numerous other tasks that run fine on both Ubuntu and OS X. OS X using FreeBSD as its Unix layer doesn't preclude it from interoperability with other *nix like systems.

If you've ever seriously written shell scripts you'll know that they're not 100% portable. You always have to go through hoops to make them work properly across operating systems systems. BSD and OS X come with the BSD userland tools, with the exception of bash being default on OS X. Linux comes with the GNU userland. A few differences from the top of my head:

- BSD utilities do not accept any -options after filenames, GNU utilities do.

- The situation is reversed for BSD find. It insists on accepting a directory name as the first parameter.

- BSD sed doesn't support the -i option in the same way as GNU sed does.

- Even different versions of GNU utilities are not necessarily compatible. A few years ago I ran into compatibility problems with 'head', 'tail' and even 'free' across different Linux distros. I can't remember the exact issues though.

So I agree with the grandparent, Node and Python are a lot more portable than shell scripts.

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#49

Post by VeejayRampay »

Yet some of the people singled out as the snarks in this article are people active in the community as teachers, participate to user groups, spend a lot of their free time on maintaining beginner-oriented software. Life is best seen in shades of grey and I'm sure they sincerely regret having reacted that way.

The more general issue is that Internet has become a place of competition and EXTREME negativity, just read any article on Hacker News if you need convincing. Some dude will spend months or years working on some shit, only to be greeted with cheers and claps like "wow, that sucks", "How is that useful?", "Your code is bad and you should feel bad", "LOL, you handled security like my 2-year old handles the TV remote". So no, it's not even a problem of calling out code when it's bad, it's just a simple matter of recognizing that those people you so hastily call out are in fact human beings. And NO ONE likes to be humiliated.

Re: If You Call Out Bad Code, Make Sure It's Bad First

#50

Post by pdonis »

pbiggar wrote: post #14

Another issue in the "is Node right for this" is that it's very very portable, significantly more so that shell scripts (Mac uses BSD utilities, windows has nothing unless you have cygwin), and even slightly more portable than python.

slightly more portable than python

Can you elaborate on this?

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