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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#221

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

monknomo wrote: post #71
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. A lot of technical design goes into JS projects. React is designed in a Herculean effort to minimize DOM refresh and thrashing. JQuery was built to fix very real problems: API incompatability between browsers, and extreme verbosity in common idioms. Babel is a compiler, with all that entails.

The users of these libraries benefit from this herculean effort of very real programming, but are mostly not the herculean programmers. The users are the community, not the library creators. And the users are mostly, from what I see, the arty designy web dev types. That doesn't take away from the real problems, or the tricky design or difficulty in building a compiler for the community.

But the people behind those libraries are part of the community.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#222

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

striking wrote: post #67
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's worth it: we've considered it, and we think you're wrong.

Or not even just that one is particularly "wrong", but that it's a matter of opinion that is differently valid to different people. That's as much reasoning as you can do on the scale of an entire language, without getting more concrete about your arguments. edit: also, "ideological" is unfair. We know JS isn't godlike. We use it regardless.

That was more or less my point. So thanks for clarifying it.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#223

Post by GavinMcG »

kazinator wrote: post #217
GavinMcG wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another big difference is that I'm not advocating for us to "repeat" that we should all be positive. It's not about public proclamation – it's about addressing individuals and their individual acts. That's what the communal discourse is made up of. Like you're saying, simply shouting "let's be nice" obviously doesn't work. I'll add another thing to my list of suggestions: be really deliberate about educating people o…

"JS-land" spans every web browser on the planet. JavaScript isn't some open source little language with a little community; it's what everyone has to use to target a web browser, whether they like it or not. Nobody has to like JavaScript or be in some unofficial JavaScript community in order to develop in JavaScript.

And yet everyone who wants to develop in JavaScript does have to interact with various hubs of the JavaScript ecosystem. Why can't they be exposed to positive influences there?

Re: Dear JavaScript

#224

Post by pfranz »

c3RlcGhlbnI_ wrote: post #194
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…

Yeah, I don't think a name change would have fixed this case. Here you were just wrong. You failed to predict the impact of such a visible change and as such did not implement the change in such a way to minimize impact or use an appropriate migration plan so as to not surprise users. Sadly the users most likely to be inconvenienced by a change like that are also those with the least knowledge of the product(like if…

This is what makes open source (and a lot of volunteering) really difficult. If you look at a sibling post, one reason given was, "Just tried to use hyperbole to bust the Javascript echo chamber." I think that's true for many of the egregious examples, but it still hurts and isn't fair the people working on the project.

The lines get blurry, XP has a business case for dropping support, Google (and GNU) are decently funded I imagine. I'm not sure how much his work at Facebook and his contribution to open source overlap, but it's not fair to be outraged or make demands if you're not paying anything--especially if this is all work done own his own, for fun.

Hell, I work in an industry where we pay for expensive software but don't have a venue to complain about bugs or feature changes because they don't make themselves accessible. We could pay 10x more money and get a support contract where we can yell at them, I've worked at places that do, and they likely won't address your issues. Pay 100x more and they'll write a custom version for you. With OSS, many times, we get this for free.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#225

Post by dwaltrip »

zeveb wrote: post #212
dwaltrip wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You honestly believe people who build web apps with javascript are not "real programmers"? Would you like to elaborate on that? It's not surprising that many find it offensive when people don't bother to differentiate between newbie programmers who have just learned the basics of jQuery and experienced front-end developers capable of building complex, well-architected applications.

> You honestly believe people who build web apps with javascript are not "real programmers" I didn't write that, nor do I believe. JavaScript is a programming language — albeit a truly awful one — and thus people who get work done in it are by definition really programmers. And some of them have done some really quite amazing things with it. That doesn't change the fact that the success of JavaScript is an embarrassm…

Hmm, I suppose the paragraph before the one you quoted was the more problematic one. I apologize for downvoting, I should have been more careful.

Although it may have helped if you would have made it clear you didn't agree with the paragraph prior to the one you quoted.

Regarding Javascript itself, yeah it has some warts. But modern Javascript (ES6) is actually not too bad. IMO, it really isn't that much worse than Python or Ruby (which I've used a good amount).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#226

Post by rk06 »

joshmanders wrote: post #210
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So then you're gonna have people looking at you and saying "ugh, Angular is old and outdated, you should be using ng-not-angular-but-newer-and-shiner!" and everyones gonna be upset that they didn't find out what the new versions name is so that they can upgrade to that.

If people have a hard time googling that info OR angular devs can't communicate that info well, then problem lies elsewhere.

Besides, the one reason, of using a different name is, to convey that it is a different framework just like others.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#227

Post by [deleted] »

joshmanders wrote: post #210
ajeet_dhaliwal wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So then you're gonna have people looking at you and saying "ugh, Angular is old and outdated, you should be using ng-not-angular-but-newer-and-shiner!" and everyones gonna be upset that they didn't find out what the new versions name is so that they can upgrade to that.

[deleted]

Re: Dear JavaScript

#229

Post by andrewstuart »

I wrote the mentioned “[Babel 6 is] a lesson in how not to design software”.

Maybe I shouldn't have written it at all. It's never my intent to hurt or insult anyone. Not by way of excuse, but by way of explanation all I can say is that Babel 6 is at the heart of JavaScript, and my experience of using it was days of crushing, mind bending pain because I had to configure everything - the point of the blog paost being that conventional wisdom is to make a set of rational configuration choices for your user, whilst Babel goes the OPPOSITE way - it does NOTHING by default.

Perhaps if a person is unhappy with the outcome of using some open source software then the best thing to do is just turn away and silently stop using it.

Hard to do though when that software has become central to the ecosystem.

I hope I was criticising the software design decisions and not the authors.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#230

Post by godmodus »

thejameskyle wrote: post #73
usurpers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You assume I was being paid to work on Babel. I didn't assume that. This post isn't about Babel, it's about the "JavaScript community", which you are being paid to work with. > The vast majority of open source maintainers are not paid in anyway whatsoever. I know. I'm one of them. I spend ~20 hours a week on open source on top of my full-time job. I know how stressful it can be, but I'll never complain about it bec…

I wasn't saying that people don't have a right to be frustrated or angry. I wasn't saying we shouldn't voice our criticisms as developers or that we shouldn't disagree with one another. The only argument I'm really trying to make in this article is that when someone has stepped over a line into outraged attacks on tools and authors that the community shouldn't reward them for that. Apparently this is too much to ask…

Mean people Sadly come with the territory in STEM :/

The math sphere is even more brutal. It's sad fact but people in our field are less emotionally aware than others and have a low frustration threshold. It helps to fortify against that.

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