Being Slow to Criticise
solipsys.co.uk
Being Slow to Criticise
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Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#2[deleted]
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#3There's another factor at play in these discussions: Cynicism tends to look smart to outside observers.
Cynicism is often mistaken for competence to outside observers. If a piece of software has a specific problem, the person chanting "This software is garbage" is going to look smarter than the people saying "Hold on, maybe this software is this way for a reason".
There are various (somewhat weak) studies on the topic. For example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29993325
> Four studies showed that laypeople tend to believe in cynical individuals' cognitive superiority. A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.
In toxic and mismanaged environments, being a cynic from the sidelines can be a better political strategy than being the positive person in the trenches trying to find solutions and compromises.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#4Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important.
That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT.
Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languages) is very hard. Many industries start life fragmented, but looking now at the tech landscape, sadly there is more hegemony in the proprietary world than the open source one.
If FOSS is ever to be adopted by a wider community that is inviting to newcomers (both users and hackers), this has to be addressed. It is not being addressed, and the power and elegance offered by the tech giants (Swift, C#/.NET etc.) continues to lap open source equivalents.
One example I'll cite is Inkscape. I now honestly believe it would have resulted in better software if this has been written once per platform (WinForms/WPF + Cocoa) rather than with GTK. It's years between minor bug releases, and it gets slower with each release. The (just released) 1.0 is unbearably slow (i.e. unusable). I've spent many hours trying to get familiar with the codebase so I could contribute to it. There's no documentation to speak of for developers, and the little that I've grasped so far leads me to thing it's better left to rot. The core is based on Sodipodi, a project abandoned in 2003.
FWIW I have started writing a clean room replacement in Swift/AppKit, but I'm considering altering this to Swift/UIKit for iPad so it'll be cross platform (albeit Apple only).
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#5People who are slow to criticize seem wise to me. Maybe they've seen similar situations before, they might have ideas about an optimal outcome.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#6Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important. That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT. Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languag…
I'm going to guess you're pretty exclusively an Apple user. I think a big part of the problem is that a lot of the people developing FOSS don't have access to Apple's platforms for doing development, and in many cases, even testing. Because of the walls that Apple has set up for it's platform, doing so is often impractically expensive.
I think this is part of what is meant by being slow to critisize. Yes, FOSS often sucks on Apple's platform, but it's also useful to understand the factors involved, and what motivates people.
P.S. The best of luck in your endevors! I think the world of SVG editors could use some solid competiton.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#7I love this short post. Software development is fundamentally hard, despite many frequent statements to the contrary by the "everyone should be a programmer" folks.
It requires uncommon persistence, and a love (if not an aptitude) of abstract reasoning in pure form.
I think the thought process goes like this: "What's he doing?" "He's doing THAT!?" "Why?!" "I don't understand why." "This software is garbage."
Some people claim to be able to glance at code and know what it's doing quickly, but it's just not possible to ingest a few thousand lines of self-referencing logic and understand it quickly if it is doing much more than shuttling data between a database and some kind of display rendering.
If you've learned to program, you must have learned patience for yourself. You have to show that same patience to the authors of other programs if you want to understand their work. There are many thoughts embedded in their code. It is deeply complex as the person who wrote it.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#8Being slow to criticise, particularly with colleagues you have to work day in and day out with, is critically important. That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap, or built on libraries and/or toolkits that are crap. I cite specifically anything of the GTK flavour, many popular things built in C/C++, and to a lesser degree QT. Why is this? Writing capstone technology (compilers and languag…
That said, much of the FOSS currently available is either itself crap...
I understood the article was about criticizing persons and their reasons for doing something. What you say is an opinion on results, an opinion that could be correct. But you can't make a convincing criticism of behaviour based on results, except with better results.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#9There's another factor at play in these discussions: Cynicism tends to look smart to outside observers. Cynicism is often mistaken for competence to outside observers. If a piece of software has a specific problem, the person chanting "This software is garbage" is going to look smarter than the people saying "Hold on, maybe this software is this way for a reason". There are various (somewhat weak) studies on the topi…
Reading that study cynicism was essentially defined as "low trust in others" and competence was ability in a handful of cognitively intensive tasks.
Re: Being Slow to Criticise
#10I see Colin is atoning and reforming from even 1 day ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23125032
This is good