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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#111

Post by striking »

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.

The response to his comment was immediate, unanimous, and unequivocal.

HN mods responded, the comment was flagged and killed and downvoted to hell.

Also, the way it was written may not have been the way he intended to come across. Read dang's comment, as well as his downthread comment.

All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#112

Post by mrec »

_asciiker_ wrote: post #97

hey now ... "I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind." I find that HN has one of the most sober comment sections I could ever wish for, it's certainly better than Reddit. I m…

You can't really generalize about Reddit comment quality; it depends entirely on what you're looking at. Quality is strongly inversely correlated with sub size, so all the default subs are pretty bad. But there are notable exceptions to that correlation, like the consistently awe-inspiring /r/askhistorians

Re: Dear JavaScript

#113

Post by GoToRO »

People are angry because you waste their time! Every single time you release some garbage but you write on the label that it's the next big thing people will lose time with it. And time is something you can not get back, no matter how much money you have.

As an irony the only people that really profited from OSS are... the big corporations.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#114

Post by joshmanders »

davej wrote: post #103
thejameskyle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ba…

> 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.

There's ways around this. Tools people built to make this easier.

I created a preset of my own for Babel, and now I use that for any new project, no figuring it out every time. I know what my preset has in it, and if I need anything new, I can put it in and all other projects have it now too.

Same with ESLint, there's tools such as Standard (And the standard-engine if you don't want to use actually standard) where it IS drop in again.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#115

Post by petetnt »

mi100hael wrote: post #99
nkw wrote: post #17

I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github "issues" that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source repositories that were rants about why feature X wasn't available yet or a priority yet, or demanding that someone walk them through some installation issue because the poster couldn't understand (or didn't read) the README. None of the people that posted this s…

I agree 100%. GitHub muddles the contribution process and support process. Couple that with the irony of developing free software using a bunch of proprietary, commercial tools, and I much prefer the tried & true IRC/mailing list approach to the trendy Slack/GitHub stack. I think a large part of the problem is that the current generation of new developers is completely conditioned by Facebook, Google, Dropbox, etc to…

Creating barriers or deliberately keeping them up is never the solution. Every time you create more obstacles, you'll end up losing a future contributor or two. Contributors that might end up solving larger future problems or ones that end up owning the whole project after you have moved on. It's not about the slightest inconvenience and obviously you might get slightly larger signal-to-noise ratio but when was the last time keeping into your own small bubble paid off? Most likely never.

At the Brackets project (https://github.com/adobe/brackets) we have seen lots of new active contributors that started from none to giving steady stream of PRs and the effort needed for that was just a slight push to the right direction.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#116

Post by FussyZeus »

jasode wrote: post #79
Mouq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but he's specifically calling out communities that reward negative behavior rather than calling it out. I mean, are you being serious right now? There's a difference between "boo hoo everyone's so mean :'((" and "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address", and that's pretty explicitly the point of the article.

James Kyle wrote: >There’s a lot of these “sub-communities”, places like /r/javascript and Hacker News that often reward negativity more than positivity. and you write: "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address", Ok... so exactly how do we address it? Do we repeat, "From now on, let's all be nicer with more positive energy and feedback!" Ok, now that we've done that, is the problem solved? Why no…

The Appeal to Tradition fallacy, because things have always been shitty and improvement is hard.

Just because people have always been jerks doesn't mean we have to be forever. The idea of inclusion, bringing in more brains in more people to accomplish the same goal is a universal gain for everyone involved, including the people who get angry about it.

You can minimize the effects of a toxic culture that rewards people for being rude, you can even file it under "meritocracy" which has never existed anywhere in human history, you can do anything else to justify why you have the right to be a jerk and no one can stop you and as a maintainer that's fine, you have that right. But in doing so you push out valuable developer resources, new people, and fresh ideas which only hurts the thing you're trying to build or use.

Anyone can get angry. Anyone can take to a keyboard and spill a row of profanity and impotent rage because it makes them feel better for a short moment. It takes real scholars to get out there and actually solve the problems, and I'm sorry but no problems have ever been solved by techbros highfiving each others blog posts.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#117

Post by Davertron »

ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #105
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 com…

Rich Hickey just did a great talk about this sort of thing at Clojure Conj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyLBGkS5ICk

Re: Dear JavaScript

#118

Post by marknadal »

I thought I agreed but then I read this guy's pinned tweet thread, and he is being very demeaning of other people "Shut up David, no one likes you" https://twitter.com/thejameskyle/status/788799662438227969 (I don't care if he's being sarcastic or teasing, this isn't the attitude that makes people feel uplifted).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#119

Post by mikemcquaid »

striking wrote: post #111
moosingin3space wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The response to his comment was immediate, unanimous, and unequivocal. HN mods responded, the comment was flagged and killed and downvoted to hell. Also, the way it was written may not have been the way he intended to come across. Read dang's comment, as well as his downthread comment. All things considered, HN is definitely not a bad place.

The mods did well there, I agree, but it was the top-voted comment for a fair while (most of the working day, European time). Perhaps that says something about European vs. American attitudes on such thing, I dunno (I'm European).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#120

Post by michaelmcmillan »

dham wrote: post #106
thejameskyle wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Not invested in this discussion, but it sure is refreshing to see someone change their mind in "real time" and show self awareness. I appreciate that!
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