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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#151

Post by kazinator »

> Hacker News often rewards negativity.

Hacker News has a very good mechanism for combating negativity. However, the moderation mechanisms of Hacker News cannot suppress the mass hatred of something.

When we see, on HN, a pattern of seething negativity against something leaking through the fine moderation system, maybe that something has some property which induces negativity. Be it completely unfair, or be it rationally justified, there it is.

There is a way not to be confronted with anything negative, while staying online: join one of those social networks whose job is to feed you ads, surrounded only by content that you like, based on your liking history.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#152

Post by shadowban_me »

jordanlev wrote: post #133
jasode wrote: post #19

> But when someone starts to insult me in mock my hard work, when they criticize me and my work in a way that is extremely negative, it gets to me. That seems to be the essence of his entire essay. He wants people to be nicer. Yes, criticism is often necessary and often motivates progress, but the criticism should be nicer. Well, that's an ideal but his lament isn't limited to Javascript specifically. Nasty complaini…

I took the essence of his essay to be "communities that are primarily negative about things are hurting themselves because they push out the people who are in a position to help them".

The way I understand it is that no matter how well you manage problems, JavaScript is always going to be an abortion of a language because the real problems are higher up the ladder where developers are not allowed.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#153

Post by ry_ry »

pvg wrote: post #134
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…

What specifically do you find 'really shitty' about that Angular 2 article? The reddit thread gets pretty unpleasant but the write-up itself is strident but generally sticks to specific issues. It doesn't seem like 'an attack on the maintainers', certainly not by title alone.

Because (if I'm remembering the article correctly, am working from volatile memory and not gone back over it, so apologies if I've overcooked this) it's not phrased as particularly constructive criticism, it basically just hilights general pain points in a slightly snarky way.

Learning to take criticism well is HARD, I'm still relatively shit at it despite my best efforts, but learning to give criticism well is even harder.

As a community, we lack some degree of common community spirit, to coin a particularly trite phrase.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#154

Post by choward »

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…

I agree mainly for googleability. It's really annoying searching for Angular 1 stuff and getting Angular 2 results and vice-versa.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#155

Post by Klathmon »

atemerev wrote: post #51

Dear James, I understand that hearing rants about your brainchild that took so much hard work is hard and depressing. I was in your shoes, too. And being a head of popular open source project is very emotionally unrewarding, to say the least. And thank you for your hard work — like nearly every front end developer out there, I used Babel, and it did it job, eventually. However, I am one of those people who think that…

Now I apologise if you've explained this elsewhere, but nowhere in your comment did you point out specific problems that you had with Babel 6.

You called it "unintuitive", "terrible", "frustrating", and said that it "broke the web", but you never explain how or why.

And I think that's part of the problem. It's one thing to suggest improvements, explain why something hurt, or how it caused an issue. It's another entirely to say again and again how much you personally dislike the project without offering anything of substance.

Personally, I think that you can suggest improvements, changes, fixes, or say how you would have prefered a change happen without the extra parts about how much you disliked or even hated the project.

Again, you could have explained this elsewhere, but without a link, a reference, or just reiterating the bullet points, it's going to come across as just more "bitching" which helps nobody.

As for another point of view, for me Babel 6 was a breath of fresh air. I waited a good couple months before updating, and found that it was easier to configure, easier to remove the parts I didn't need, quicker to setup, and overall just nicer to work with. To me it was a welcome change that I saw as Babel giving you an "out", paving the way for a day when you can incrementally remove babel from your pipeline and not have to deal with it again (opposed to the Babel 5 setup which was "all or nothing" unless you dove deep into the configuration hell). It had some fuckups (documentation was difficult at the beginning which is why I held off, and I still believe it has some holes with regards to exactly what some of the plugins do and what each one requires in terms of "polyfills" or other plugins), but nothing is free of problems, and despite all of the complaining about how it "broke the web" everything seems to have moved on fine. Even you yourself admitted it took you 3 days. While everyone involved thinks that's too long, and you are just one of many who had a similar story, in the long run is not that big of a deal.

I think there were things that everyone could have done better, and talking about those things specifically is going to be infinitely more helpful than any venting or rage will ever be.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#156

Post by rfrey »

atemerev wrote: post #88
magicalist wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I am one of those people who think that Babel6 is terrible, that it "broke the web", and it marked the beginning of the entire JavaScript fatigue era. Babel6 transition took three days of my life, filled it with misery and rage, lost me a customer, and led to my desire to never touch JavaScript again if I can help it. (I moved to ScalaJS eventually). Bad news: you are not a special snowflake deserving of a…

I do sincerely apologize if something I had said sounded offensive to you or anybody else. However, I can't help but ask the question: am I the one who resorts to personal attacks here?

Your comment reads (to me) as more attacks sandwiched between slices of insincere apologies. You likely did not mean it to read that way, but it does.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#157

Post by magicalist »

jasode wrote: post #150
GavinMcG wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are nice communities out there. It seems more naive to me to think that we might as well just throw our hands up in the air than to think that we can identify ways to move ourselves forward. You've also shifted your criticism here to "Ok, but how?" from the original criticism that sounded like "Well, humans suck. Boo hoo." So, here's one answer to how: as I am doing right now, we can encourage others to be opti…

>You've also shifted your criticism here to "Ok, but how?" from the original criticism that sounded like "Well, humans suck. Boo hoo." It's not shifting positions. My 1st post was general commentary on JK's post. My 2nd post was asking Mouq to clarify his "solution" since he didn't actually state a concrete solution. >So, here's one answer to how: as I am doing right now, we can encourage others to be optimistic Yes,…

> > So, here's one answer to how: as I am doing right now, we can encourage others to be optimistic

> Yes, did you notice that I already made that suggestion in my post that you replied to and you just repeated it?

Hmm, let's see...

> 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 not?

yeah, no, that's not the same thing at all.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#158

Post by EdSharkey »

I think a bug tracker is where the rubber meets the road. Blog posts people write or hecklers on forums are potential avenues to take feedback, but a bug tracker is where you can expect the most actionable feedback.

Since that's the maintainers' domain, I don't see why they shouldn't just close issues as "will-not-fix" with tags like RUDE or SUBMISSION_GUIDELINES. If someone is taking the time to file a bug report, and they genuinely want to see their problem get better, they'll follow the bug submission guidelines and give you a detailed report. Heck, if they really want to see change, maybe they'll even file a pull request with a patch. If someone just wants to flame or be snarky, close their bug and hopefully they'll try again with a more business-like, respectful post. Never forget, they are coming to you, and the customer isn't always right even if they are paying you.

It's okay to blow people off who are just in the game to tear you a new one; life's too short to give them the satisfaction of your care and your craft. Trust me, the harshest thing you can do to someone like that is to ignore them completely as they've just wasted their time and energy flaming you. You can take some satisfaction in that.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#159

Post by erikpukinskis »

This reminds me of a powerful skill we could probably use a bit more of in this day and age:

Recognize when you're just the flashpoint for someone's anger, not the cause of it, and don't take it personally.

Abuse shouldn't be tolerated of course. But sometimes you're just the straw that broke the camel's back. And in those moments, if you can let yourself off the hook, and realize that there is a bigger issue going on, you can often redirect the conversation toward that bigger issue.

Maybe if OP spent less time defending himself, less time taking the complaints personally, and more time just commiserating with people about the changes in the JavaScript community and how we should deal with them... maybe those interactions would've gone better and he'd be less burnt out.

I realize this is victim blaming, from the perspective of someone who was just bullied. So, please don't take this as a critique of OP. It's just a path I am trying to keep in mind.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#160

Post by pheeney »

rygine wrote: post #101

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 communit…

thejameskyle replied on reddit for anyone interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/5gmjdx/dear_jav...

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I have been on the receiving end of Kyle's outrage and I too feel the need to speak out that he has acted in direct opposition to what he is now promoting. I was a new contributor to lerna, no previous interactions with Kyle or babel, and have experienced some of the following:

> My first PR was continuously rejected because he "did not understand my use case". I elaborated several times in great detail. Other project maintainers eventually chimed in that it was a good idea and should be accepted. Kyle continued to keep the issue closed and ignored all contact, including from other maintainers he works with, even to this day.

> My second interaction with Kyle was one of the most highly requested features for lerna (nested directory support). I championed the issue and over the course of a year I attempted to get direction on which path would be accepted to submit a PR. It was ignored, so after a year, I mentioned I wrote some custom scripts and used another project to fill in the gaps. This seemed to immediately set off Kyle and he immediately locked the issue.

> I opened a new issue since the original idea was accepted by Kyle and figured we could start fresh with a new discussion to avoid what led to him closing it in the first place. It was immediately Locked as well.

> I reached out to Kyle on twitter to understand why everything I posted is immediately locked. No response.

> I reached out on Discord to other staff members. Was also ignored. Eventually Kyle communicated with me on Discord with a very illuminating conversion. He didn't like the amount of github notifications he received so instead of unsubscribing he decided to lock all my threads. He provided several other reasons but essentially resorted to bullying tactics and said I should find another community.

> I opened a Code of Conduct investigation because he was actively suppressing all my communication. He abused his power on more than one occasion and the public conversations we had were very aggressive on his part. He was found to be at fault during the investigation by Sebastian. Sebastian said his attempts to talk to Kyle were dismissed. No other maintainers responded to the incident that were listed on the code of conduct. They said nothing can be done about it, so essentially suck it up, even though they mentioned the steps that will be taken in the Code of Conduct. It was a complete joke and they should not have this document live. The only outcome from this was Kyle re-opened the original github issue he suppressed.

> Other babel community members reached out and said they saw the chat and said sorry, it sucks, and they wish there was something they could do. It's nice to know there are people out there who recognize this toxic behavior from project maintainers.

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The whole experience was very upsetting. I will never contribute or participate with anything involving Kyle. No other maintainers and staff that work with Kyle, held Kyle accountable. At no point has Kyle held himself accountable. I was no one to Kyle, and a potentially new contributor. If I had this experience, I wonder how many others did as well. I am sure his message sounds good but if he doesn't practice what he preaches, then what is all of this for? I hope he has changed.

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