21–30 of 52 posts
It's possible to learn from other people. And better tools do make your life better, even when "nothing was wrong" with the old tools. While you shouldn't try to upset people, negative feedback is valuable. I don't think this is the way forward.
Better tools improve our lives, but better tools should not be the primary focus of average developers. If too much of the labor force becomes obsessed with creating tools, there won't be enough of us left to build great things with them. If we spend too much of our time testing new tools, our innovation will end with tools.
Creating great things takes mastery. Mastery requires a foundation. If we aren't careful, we may soon become masters of rejiggering our stack with no idea what to do once it's complete. If that becomes the dominant habit of our industry, we'll be in trouble.
> Nobody talks to each other so everyone is reinventing the wheel.
> Still, nobody talks about sharing concepts that would definitely improve all of them.
> I will continue to talk to each and everyone about old, new and maybe broken technologies.
> Stop talking about tools, stop being a smart ass about why something should have been done differently.
I really dislike the opening of the last quote, and I think the author would probably rephrase it if he looked at it in this context. I don't want people to stop talking about tools more method, we just shouldn't be jerks about it and we should ask more questions than we prescribe medicine.
As to the other points, I'm not entirely convinced I agree things have gotten worse. I actually see more collaboration than I saw 10 years ago. I think he's confusing the shear volume of open source projects with people not collaborating and communicating. I think it's basically a lot easier for lone coders to publish and share their solutions, so it appears the entire collaborative landscape has changed.
> When someone actually has built something, and it could be used by someone, they only get feedback about the size of the pages, how slow it is and that they should have used some other technology after all. I know of a certain community where this seems to happen a lot. Instead of commenting on the actual content or the idea, it's always "Their web page doesn't SCROLL the way I like!!" and "What amateurs--they shou…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of Mercurial being considered old and outdated is particularly baffling.
Maybe he forgot to include "popular" or "hip" in his list of adjectives. I guess it's also possible that it's status comes across as "outdated" because, as a tool, it seems to have a stronger preference amount heavy svn users (the people that think git's ability to rewrite commits is 'scary')?
That said, I'd never call mercurial outdated. If I saw it on a resume or someone mentioned it when asked what version control systems they'd used, I'd consider it a major positive, much more so than if I only see CVS, which in turn is better than seeing no version control at all or having someone give a blank look when asked what version control systems they've used.
And if someone says they've used both mercurial and git, that's the perfect opportunity to ask them to compare the two and mention what they like and don't like about each. If you've only ever used one, you don't necessarily have the basis on which to make a good comparison.
I've used both mercurial and git (as well as RCS, CVS, SVN, tla/baz, and bzr), and I can spell out exactly why I prefer git over each of them.
Constructive, productive communities are very tenuous things and I think there's just a natural entropy that happens as they grow where the tone of the conversation gets watered down, snarkiness and flames beget more snarkiness and flames, the more mature community members get annoyed and stop participating, and after a while it's just a bunch of people who don't know what they don't know screaming at each other about which phone/language/Linux distro/whatever they use.
It's tempting to attribute this to the profession as a whole ("my fellow developers used to be interesting, now they're all jerks!"), but I think it's more just the inevitable deterioration someone sees if they go to the same forums or stay on the same mailing lists for a few years. It might also be due to the observer getting more mature and clueful and picking up on negatives that have always been present in those communities, but previously unnoticed. Back in 1995 I really put Usenet on a pedestal, but that's partially because I was way more immature and thought many of the other posters were far more insightful than they actually were. In other words, it may seem like everyone else has become really clueless and immature but part of that could just be you, the observer, becoming more experienced and mature.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, PHP is kinda dangerous, especially in the hands of novices. Honestly, a world with fewer people-who've-never-written-code writing PHP doesn't sound like a bad start to me. Don't get me wrong, it's possible to write great code in PHP, it's just a language that makes it easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot.
You hear the same argument for C / C++ but you don't see people putting it down as much as PHP.
There's a difference in that PHP originated as a low-quality templating language, and that C/C++ are historical monuments of computing that most of the infrastructure of the world and most of the interpreted languages of the world run on.
There's not much of a difference in people calling both old, only used by dinosaurs, essentially unsafe, and the root cause of all bugs being choosing to use them in the first place.
> When someone actually has built something, and it could be used by someone, they only get feedback about the size of the pages, how slow it is and that they should have used some other technology after all. I know of a certain community where this seems to happen a lot. Instead of commenting on the actual content or the idea, it's always "Their web page doesn't SCROLL the way I like!!" and "What amateurs--they shou…
> When someone actually has built something, and it could be used by someone, they only get feedback about the size of the pages, how slow it is and that they should have used some other technology after all. I know of a certain community where this seems to happen a lot. Instead of commenting on the actual content or the idea, it's always "Their web page doesn't SCROLL the way I like!!" and "What amateurs--they shou…
Messed up js scrolling often means I _can't_ read the actual content. I know WP8 isn't that common, but should I just quietly accept that yet another developer decided to "innovate" and wrote a super sexy scroller that crashes and burns on my browser?
If someone spends months working on a site to incorporate new technology, it's really frustrating if the main feedback is that it breaks scrolling in someone's esoteric preferred web browser.
> When someone actually has built something, and it could be used by someone, they only get feedback about the size of the pages, how slow it is and that they should have used some other technology after all. I know of a certain community where this seems to happen a lot. Instead of commenting on the actual content or the idea, it's always "Their web page doesn't SCROLL the way I like!!" and "What amateurs--they shou…
Messed up js scrolling often means I _can't_ read the actual content. I know WP8 isn't that common, but should I just quietly accept that yet another developer decided to "innovate" and wrote a super sexy scroller that crashes and burns on my browser?