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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#171

Post by sp332 »

hitekker wrote: post #164
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…

The syntax of your first example is so, so much easier to grok than the syntax of the second.

You don't have to literally pipe it into a file, you can just open it in an editor. The "syntax" in the example is just an example.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#172

Post by pavlov »

endisukaj wrote: post #143
pavlov wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many prominent open source projects are supported and often initiated by corporations. I imagine Google pays the core Angular team quite well.

Of course. But most of the time users are not paying the maintainers whereas with government employees you are paying them through your taxes.

I don't know. If you use Google products and see ads, you're indirectly paying for the development of Angular.

Not everyone who uses government services directly pays for them either (they might not have income or it might be less than the required minimum for federal/national tax, for example).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#173

Post by Gudahtt »

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…

>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.

Granted, I wouldn't consider this a personal attack. But it definitely qualifies as negative and nonconstructive.

I literally can't imagine how one could argue that they "broke the web"; that's completely ridiculous. If the migration path wasn't explained very well, why not say that? Or if you find configuring the tool confusing, and would prefer it to have "sane defaults" in the absence of configuration, why not say that? Instead of calling it terrible and blaming it for the "javascript fatigue era".

They realized that what had once been "sane defaults" were no longer sane, so they removed them. That's it. I can accept that there were legitimate complaints to be made, but the hyperbole and general negativity was over the top on this one.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#174

Post by rudolf0 »

jondubois wrote: post #100

I dislike all JavaScript transpilers. I still cannot get my head around how CoffeeScript ever got so popular. The complexity and friction that transpilers add is not worth the tiny benefits that they offer. I've worked on many projects where I had to wait for like 20 seconds for the code to compile each time I made a change to it. From my point of view, it sounds like the author of this article is merely feeling the…

Just to provide a contrasting point of view: CoffeeScript is the only reason I ever wrote, and ever write, JavaScript. Period. Transpilers do add a layer of complexity, but all of the syntax sugar advantages make it more than worth it to me.

I would not ever write JavaScript if CoffeeScript or similar languages did not exist. Before it existed, I never touched the language. I now use CoffeeScript daily and have never been happier. A watchdog script automatically transpiles the code upon updates, and everything is completely seamless for me.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#175

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Dear JavaScript

#176

Post by Noseshine »

detaro wrote: post #36
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…

regarding your first point: often there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support channel/community. Mailing lists are less and less popular, if one exists its web interface is likely a long way behind GitHub. There are no forums. Some languages have project-independent channels (e.g. message boards for python users will try to help you with whatever library you're messing with right now), but they don't exist for all e…

  > often there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support channel/community
That got me to post in "issues" a few times, while apologizing and pointing out they should have a forum. It's so easy too: Just create a new subreddit (or use an existing one) and - that part is important!! - point to it as an official channel. Flow(type.org) is an example. Their "support" links are: SO, Github issues, Twitter, IRC. All of them are very bad for discussing general usage questions. If your question isn't already very well formulated and very specific, with code, SO will downvote and close your question. IRC or any chat mixes everything and it is about that particular moment, it does not collect people's responses over the course of a day or two.

Oh and please don't create your own forum. Almost all forum software sucks. As much as one wants to complain about reddit, their forums work, and I mean the technology and design and usability. There is a Flow subreddit, but since the Flow support page doesn't point to it it's pretty empty. Flow is just an example.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#177

Post by Mouq »

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…

Moderation and social dynamics are things that have to be built from smaller scales outward. Yes, there will always be people writing articles about "This project is awful and the developers are bad people," but it's also possible to have platforms and communities that don't indulge in and enable that kind of pettiness.

And it's true that driving those people away will likely cause them to form their own communities, but so be it. More often what happens, actually, is that the people less interested in unneeded hostility (like I said about building from smaller scales) will splinter and form their own communities. If these communities are effective, however, they'll often slowly be recognized by the nasties in the original community and be invaded by the same or similar people. The real problem is figuring out how to deal with them and maintain solidarity without compromising social ideals, rather than just splintering again.

Also, I'm not real knowledgeable about issues surrounding autism, but I do know that autistic kids are a primary target of parental abuse, often by parents who may appear well-meaning from the outside... so I wouldn't be surprised if those can be quite toxic communities, especially if we're talking about parents and not autistic people themselves at the forefront of discourse. But perhaps I'm just cynical.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#178

Post by midasz »

Kequc wrote: post #142

This isn't to say people shouldn't ideally be nice to each other whenever possible. I'm so tired of hearing about how someone was slighted on the internet. Whatever it is you put out there will potentially be seen by up to 6 billion people. So "every day" you log in and see "yet another" negative comment? Grow up! There's no nice way to say that. There's going to be negative comments on the internet please please sto…

>I'm so tired of hearing about how someone was slighted on the internet.

Deal with it?

Re: Dear JavaScript

#179

Post by douche »

carsongross wrote: post #12

In the vein of "Worse is Better"[1]'s MIT/New Jersey split, my theory is that the online javascript community reflects a lot of what I would call the San Francisco/UI Design attitude (in contrast with, say, Java, which reflects the Palo Alto attitude.) The SF attitude is more driven by fashion, marketing and art/design world factors and less by raw commercial or technical aspects. This introduces a lot of subjectivit…

BTW, never click a Jamie Zawinski link on HN when you are at work...

Re: Dear JavaScript

#180

Post by 91bananas »

hitekker wrote: post #164
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…

The syntax of your first example is so, so much easier to grok than the syntax of the second.

wait, really?
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