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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

#81

Post by 5hoom »

reinhardt wrote: post #54
MartinCron wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we as a development community rationally expect to grow the open source ecosystem and encourage people with this type of snobbery? There's one lesson that I'm personally taking from this, after unsolicited ridicule, one sincere apology, one bullshit non-apology, and one arrogant I have nothing to apologize for! If I build a small thing to scratch my own itch (which I often do) I'm going to think twice about s…

Missing option: grow a thicker skin and don't take everything personally.

I've suffered pretty severe depression and anxiety for most of my adult life. While the idea that we should all just grow a thicker skin and 'just deal with it' is both understandable and practical given the nature of the internet - it just wont happen for me. I know myself well enough to have recognized that even a tiny drop of vitriol could have me questioning my every decision and shatter my self confidence for days or even weeks. So I simply write code and keep it to myself, and I'm sure there are plenty of others like me.

The idea of open sourcing our work is truly admirable however there are some of us out there who just can't stand the hate and Alpha-nerd jockeying, so we opt out. I don't think the world is missing out on much by my own lack of contribution but who knows how many truly brilliant yet fragile minds are self selecting out of the open source community because they just cannot cope?

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

#82

Post by brudgers »

A person who looks at a piece of art and says, "Eh. I could do that," isn't a critic. He's just another asshat with an opinion.

Criticism is the highest aspiration of non-fiction writers. Zinsser says so in On Writing Well so it must be true. Even if it's not, what he says about most people sucking at it, certainly is. Negative criticism is easy, positive criticism isn't. Lead with an insult, and the internet pays attention. But it is hard work to criticize something productively - to point out the value and the areas for improvement. Writing a lead for that criticism is even harder.

Most people, including myself, are not in the habit of spending the time to do it right. The article takes the time to get it right. It does so by looking at why Heather did what she did. It compares what she did to the common alternatives. The author tells what he did when faced with similar situations. That's what makes it good criticism.

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

#83

Post by ianstallings »

Man there sure are some sensitive sallies in the dev community lately over this whole debacle. Part of this industry is handling criticism. Not everyone is going to be a fan. That's part of being a developer. Devs were getting their pants torched long before me on the Internet and I don't see that ever ending. A lot of it is opinion. So treat it as such.

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

#84

Post by Moto7451 »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #46
Moto7451 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 filename…

Ah I misunderstood the comment to mean the facility just wasn't available (being lumped in with Windows) which struck me as odd.

I generally just wrap things in checks for $OSTYPE and Perl when I'm not working with the system itself.

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

#85

Post by sillysaurus »

vacri wrote: post #72
sillysaurus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitter snark isn't normal, it's an exceptional case. No, this isn't true. It's completely normal. It's been normal since long before Twitter. In exactly the same way high school bullying is normal, this is most definitely (a) prevalent, and (b) a problem. But it won't change, because people tolerate it. You want me to open up my personal projects? It's not going to happen. It won't happen because we live in an e…

You could just as easily say the first is encouraging, and the second is ignorable, so you should make it public.

the second is ignorable, so you should just make it public.

I wish it were that easy. Other people'e negativity just... gets to you.

The only way I've found to deal with it is to run away from it until I have a project I truly feel will help the world (even in some small way). Then I'll happily face the negativity.

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

#86

Post by georgemcbay »

This is getting way off topic of the original project, but as an older (40) programmer, I've learned that even if code is objectively bad you generally shouldn't call it out unless you have the full context of how it got that way.

I write code every day, some of it is great, most of it is good, some of it is shit (working shit, but shit nonetheless). The reason some of it is shit varies: time constraints don't allow for the proper solution, working around a crappy abstraction that I can't control, etc, but if you decide to focus on some snippit of the shitty code I wrote and extrapolate that to assess my skill as a programmer I reserve the right to extrapolate that your experience doing real world programming is pretty limited, because otherwise you wouldn't be so naive.

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

#87

Post by MartinCron »

carbocation wrote: post #60
reinhardt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing option: grow a thicker skin and don't take everything personally.

I, for one, look forward to the day when someone stumbles across my code and finds it worthy of commentary. Good or bad, just not indifferent, please.

Do you want meaningful commentary or empty snarky ridicule?

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

#88

Post by carbocation »

MartinCron wrote: post #87
carbocation wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, look forward to the day when someone stumbles across my code and finds it worthy of commentary. Good or bad, just not indifferent, please.

Do you want meaningful commentary or empty snarky ridicule?

I'm simply saying that at the moment, either of those would be more interesting than total ignorance.

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

#89

Post by Osiris »

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 haven't made any source code public, probably a lot for these reasons. I'm been thinking lately about working on getting a QA management tool open sourced. I believe that the community will be better off if we continue to participate together as a community rather than withholding because we're afraid of getting our feelings hurt.

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

#90

Post by CodeMage »

jussij wrote: post #78
vacri wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling someone's writings "bullshit" is pretty much the same as calling someone's code "eye-bleeding" -> "your product is of such low value it's worthless" Those that claim the genesis of this whole issue is offensive should take equal offense to the "bullshit" line.

I think that is drawing a fairly long bow. I read his use of the word bullshit as effectively saying rubbish, only in a more colourful way. So to paraphrase the OP I read him as saying: Rubbish, I don't agree with you and here is a list of reasons why?

I assume that "rubbish" or "bullshit" refer to what the other person said, so when you expand that paraphrase it turns out like this:

"What you said is rubbish. I don't agree with you and here is a list of reasons why."

Now, can you tell me what value there is in the "What you said is rubbish" part? Let's go one step further: what do you lose by omitting that part?

Mind, I'm just as sick as the next guy of the whole "we must never be negative", politically correct thought police that has been taking politeness to unrecognizable and unreasonable extremes. Sometimes there are good reasons to be aggressive or less than polite, but "sometimes" is not the same as "always" or "most of the time" or "as often as I feel like it".

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