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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#101

Post by rygine »

I usually don't comment about these type of posts, but I felt I had to speak out here when the author of this article has been an offender of the things he's trying to promote. Perhaps he has just "seen the light," but I have my reservations.

Specifically, these lines got to me:

>If we focus on solutions, focus on helping others, focus on sharing ideas, we’ll be in a better place. We’re all part of a broader community and we all have an impact on it. We can either have a positive impact or a negative one. It’s entirely up to us.

> This is the reality the community faces. We can either work to fix it or we can continue digging a deeper hole for ourselves.

At my company, we were using Lerna [1], a library to help manage mono repos. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. So I thought I'd contribute. I spent a good deal of time replying to issues, fixing bugs, and working on new features.

This was at a time when the author was mostly absent. Without the amazing help of gigabo [2] and hzoo [3], the project would have grinded to a halt. As new users rushed in to use this relatively new tool, there were many new issues and feature requests.

When the author did make his presence known, he was not very helpful [4] [5]. These are just the examples that stood out to me as a contributor. Most people understand that 1 person can't be expected to maintain a big project like this, especially when they are busy at Facebook bootcamp. That's why it had 2 additional members to help. Unfortunately, as a result of [5] above, the author decided he no longer wanted [2]'s help and removed him from the project. He removed a huge contributor because he disagreed with him and failed to openly discuss the issue. Ironic. I stopped contributing immediately. As a result, Asini [6] was born.

The thing that really pisses me off about this post from the author is that he's promoting open communication, sharing, helping others, etc... when it's the complete opposite of my experience with him. Maybe he just had a bad day on those days, maybe it was something else. I don't know him personally, I can only assume things based my interactions. Regardless, this was some extremely poor handling of an open source project.

It looks like he's active on the project again, but it doesn't look like much has changed. [7] [8] [9]

Mr. Kyle, if you're reading this, I really hope you'll follow your own advice. If I have misunderstood your actions in the past, I'm open to being wrong.

[1] https://github.com/lerna/lerna [2] https://github.com/gigabo [3] https://github.com/hzoo [4] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-2289545... [5] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/334#issuecomment-24639... [6] https://github.com/asini/asini [7] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-2523322... [8] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/386#issuecomment-2640725... [9] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/408

Re: Dear JavaScript

#102

Post by moosingin3space »

striking wrote: post #63
OskarS wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out this comment from one of the devs behind Homebrew from HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438 (this was in response that he might be a good target to sue over putting Google Analytics in Homebrew). Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.

He mentioned getting some egregiously awful comments, specifically over email. I quickly scrolled through the HN thread and didn't see many, not on "nazi" or "death threat" level. Perhaps the people that read HN and then email other people are not innocent, but there's a huge gap between the number of people who comment on HN and the number of people who just read HN. I think HN comment posters are generally innocent…

The HN commenter literally threatened to sue the developer, even calling the developer a "good target". That sort of combative language is toxicity.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#103

Post by davej »

thejameskyle wrote: post #86
fusiongyro wrote: post #50

I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate. I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a compl…

The change in Babel 6 was this: $ npm install babel-cli $ babel src -d lib To this: $ npm install babel-cli babel-preset-es2015 $ echo '{ presets: ["es2015"] }' >> .babelrc $ babel src -d lib It really wasn't that big of a change. Also, we did give it a new name. It used to be 6to5, and we changed the name around the intention to make it more generic. Which Babel 6 was the culmination of. As for communicating with th…

I think the main issue with the transition of Babel 5 -> Babel 6 was a cognitive one. A few CLI one-liners don't really address this. Babel was zero-config and now it's not. I now need to understand what presets and plugins do and how to order them to get desired results when transpiling.

Ultimately, it was inevitable and I think it was a very good thing! I'm really happy that Babel 6 exists. But figuring out your Babel presets and plugins is undoubtedly another thing that we have to think about when we start a project. Similarly with JSLint/JSHint -> ESlint.

Thank you for your great work, I use Babel daily and Flow sometimes (less often than I should).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#104

Post by jondubois »

I'm the creator of a popular open source project (but not Babel-popular). I don't have a problem with people complaining about my work; if anything, I wish they would complain more - That way I would have a better idea about which parts need to be improved!

I think that the author has no grounds to complain here; he's one of the lucky ones. I wish I was in his shoes and have people yell at me in desperation so that I could fix their problems (whilst travelling around the world). That sounds like a dream to me.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#105

Post by ajeet_dhaliwal »

fusiongyro wrote: post #50

I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate. I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a compl…

A better approach is to spin off a new system and give it a new name

Great point. I think some developers or teams feel compelled to update the latest even if they are happy with what they have because using an older version number gives the appearance of being behind the standards and practices. In a case where changes take place to the extent that it makes the previous framework difficult to recognize or breaks compatibility in a big way, this pressure would ease if the new version just had a completely different product name, as in a way that's what it is anyway.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#106

Post by dham »

thejameskyle wrote: post #86
fusiongyro wrote: post #50

I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate. I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a compl…

The change in Babel 6 was this: $ npm install babel-cli $ babel src -d lib To this: $ npm install babel-cli babel-preset-es2015 $ echo '{ presets: ["es2015"] }' >> .babelrc $ babel src -d lib It really wasn't that big of a change. Also, we did give it a new name. It used to be 6to5, and we changed the name around the intention to make it more generic. Which Babel 6 was the culmination of. As for communicating with th…

James, I reached out to Sebastian, on multiple occasions in January to apologize. Phabricator via the chat feature, Twitter(blocked), email, etc. I can't even remember all the mediums. So if you can pass it a long that would be cool. Sure, Sad state got a little personal, but I'm not too stubborn to admit when I'm wrong. I'm sorry it affected the team so much, obviously not my intention. Just tried to use hyperbole to bust the Javascript echo chamber.

I used Babel since the beginning when it was 6to5, and seeing the Babel 6 change was rough to say the least, and I made it personal when I shouldn't have. It's just software in the end.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#107

Post by alistproducer2 »

fusiongyro wrote: post #50

I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate. I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a compl…

I said the same thing when they first previewed Angular2: call it something else. everyone would still know it comes from the Angular team and it wouldn't have pissed so many people off.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#108

Post by [deleted] »

moosingin3space wrote: post #102
striking wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentioned getting some egregiously awful comments, specifically over email. I quickly scrolled through the HN thread and didn't see many, not on "nazi" or "death threat" level. Perhaps the people that read HN and then email other people are not innocent, but there's a huge gap between the number of people who comment on HN and the number of people who just read HN. I think HN comment posters are generally innocent…

The HN commenter literally threatened to sue the developer, even calling the developer a "good target". That sort of combative language is toxicity.

[deleted]

Re: Dear JavaScript

#109

Post by gabeio »

moosingin3space wrote: post #98
gabeio wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree subreddits and IRC, can be moderated by users who don't need to directly have repo access, sort of an abstraction, unlike how github repo members/collaborators would, can be a huge assist to eliminating that toxicity. It even has the potential to be handled before the negativity ever gets to those who have so much going for the project, unlike github issues currently which really require the collaborators who…

Sort of like gitlab's Reporter role? Also, the biggest problem with IRC/subreddits with a dedicated community team is that it takes a long time for many projects to reach the point where this is feasible. Rust is large enough it's fine, but many small projects (like what's common in the JS community) will never get enough people to dedicate some of them to "community management".

I think so I haven't used gitlab enough. Yeah libraries do need to become large enough but I think angular2 is ~19k stars & 2k watchers which is more than expressjs/express watchers but less stars, but it depends because I do sort of this role with expressjs/session which is pretty small 1-2k stars I try to help with what issues I know how to and to get all the information from the users to help debug. We have only had one issue (that I know of) of users negatively critiquing the library.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#110

Post by forgottenpass »

It felt like every day I had a notification waiting to be opened about how badly we had fucked up.

It's interesting that the author phrases it this way, and dove tails nicely into a thought I've been having about interaction on the internet for a while. I don't say this specifically to the author, but generically, it's even something I'm working on being more aware of.

Social tools and other apps have turned notifications into a Pavlovian variable-interval reward loop. This makes negativity even harder to handle. But seeing the system laid bare makes it easier to make decisions about.

The notification loop sort of evolved that way with texts, but is also a purposeful tool of manipulation. We politely don't conceptualize it as "manipulation" because there is weight to that word, and we don't necessarily assume the app designer is acting in bad faith. But it's still manipulative.

Think of it like this: Who _needs_ to be able to interrupt you every waking moment of your life? Then why are you letting a single person more? Disable notifications, and just set a recurring calendar event to check email/twitter/whatever.

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