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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#231

Post by pitaj »

atemerev wrote: post #92
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did babel force you to upgrade right when version 6 came out? They bumped the major version, that should be a pretty clear indicator that existing workflows will break. Whenever you use a tool, you're accepting risk for the reward you're getting from it. If I run Gentoo on my servers, it's not really fair to complain when an update breaks something.

JavaScript world is known by moving fast and breaking things (which is fine for me, I learned to respect this culture). So, when a new version of some popular framework or tool comes out, there's a very real risk that the previous version will be abandoned really soon and left without support from developers and community (I was burned by it quite a few times). So no, had to move forward like everyone else.

That's total BS. Even if it was abandoned, it was already in a stable state with no significant bugs. It wouldn't just cease to be supported. Your workflow wouldn't have to change. And losing a customer over it? That sounds like complete incompetence on your behalf, which your customer probably figured out. Even assuming that Babel 5 would be abandoned, why move to Babel 6 so quickly instead of waiting a month or so while the nice guides, gulp plugins, etc are made?

Your whole situation and outlook really seems to be blaming anything but yourself for mistakes that you made.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#232

Post by emn13 »

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.

Well, that's hardly any different to google. You have no control over the details of those taxes. If anything, the advantage you grant google is likely more direct and quite probably more costly if you're comparing apples to apples. It's just really hard to compare those.

Don't forget, google gains quite a lot from giving away software like this, and some of their gain (in the form of control) may well be a cost to others - and it's not a zero sum game, so it's anyones guess whether it's a net positive or negative (even though that seems unlikely).

Similarly, you talk of the paying taxes as if this were some net-negative cost. There too this isn't a zero sum game - just because you distribute the costs but don't account for the benefits doesn't mean it's not net beneficial to you. The government is even larger than google (and indeed intertwined the the semi-fiction of currency), so "paying them" doesn't really mean the costs are much more direct than they are with granting google influence of the JS ecosystem.

Even if through voting you could choose the cease to "pay" for the government employees, the consequences might well be far-reaching and impact the currency system (hence "pay" in quotes), so from one point of view you can't with any reliability choose not to pay, rather, you can choose not to account for costs accrued by a large civilization. But it's highly questionable whether you can actually avoid those costs and remain a large civilization.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#233

Post by tracker1 »

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…

the cli only stopped working the same on new projects with v6, old projects should have continued to work... though a post-install that created a default .babelrc would have been nice.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#234

Post by tracker1 »

ralusek wrote: post #95
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…

I went to the Angular 2 docs and was thinking "this is nothing like Angular 1, looks like a completely different framework." Then I read from them "this is nothing like Angular 1, this is a completely different framework." Should they have gone with a different name? Probably. But my guess is that they kept it for 2 reasons. The first is the name recognition. The second, more important one, is that they're letting us…

imho they should have bumped to 3 at release to avoid old articles referencing outdated apis as ng2 had a lot of breaking changes along the way..

Re: Dear JavaScript

#235

Post by tracker1 »

detaro wrote: post #207
richardwhiuk wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a dedicated support channel because OSS contributors don't want to support a project - that's a job you need to pay someone to do, they just want to write some code that scratches their itch. If you want more than this you need to be prepared to put down some money.

Stack Overflow and forums certainly do not pay their contributors. Many forums do not even pay their moderators. Just because there are coders that do not enjoy these things does not mean there is nobody who does. The tricky bit is to find the right people and allow them help as efficiently as possible.

I had a recently gone onto SO, and a question was asked about an error in a minified file... I suggested he try the unminified version to see if the problem still existed.. I was then asked where to get the unminified version. It went downhill from there...

People really expect people volunteering time out of their day online to walk through how to troubleshoot an issue. It gets aggravating and it seems half the questions are like this.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#236

Post by throwanem »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #45
throwanem wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is HN really that bad? It seems like there are some people trying to drive it downhill in a hurry - I know it's fashionable for anyone who's been on HN for any time at all to say it's going downhill, but turn on showdead for a while and see if you don't start to feel the same.

It is right there and I never knew it existed. Turned it on, got shocked by reading such nastiness, turned it back off. The problem with negativity is that it takes much less effort to be negative than to be positive. And it's much more contagious.

It is a bit From Beyond, isn't it? No Jeffrey Combs, though, more's the pity.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#237

Post by jondubois »

rudolf0 wrote: post #174
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…

The real problem that CoffeeScript solves is developer stubbornness.

Some developers decided a long time ago that JavaScript is terrible and so CoffeeScript gave them a way to program in JavaScript without changing their minds about how terrible JavaScript is.

The reality is that it would have been easier if developers weren't so stubborn to begin with.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#238

Post by rudolf0 »

jondubois wrote: post #237
rudolf0 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The real problem that CoffeeScript solves is developer stubbornness. Some developers decided a long time ago that JavaScript is terrible and so CoffeeScript gave them a way to program in JavaScript without changing their minds about how terrible JavaScript is. The reality is that it would have been easier if developers weren't so stubborn to begin with.

It would have been easier if JavaScript weren't so terrible to begin with.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#239

Post by forgottenpass »

nxrabl wrote: post #191

What is going on in this thread? "Just don't come here" "Just turn off your notifications" "But Angular 2/Babel 6/Literally all of Javascript really does suck" "Developers can't take criticism" "Open source communities are bubbles" "Every community is like this" "All people are like this" "Sorry, but..." Didn't our mommas teach us that when you apologize, you actually apologize ? Even if you and I personally didn't d…

Let's work on the problem.

Coo. But there's one of me, and 7 billion people that have - at least once - been more of an asshole than warranted.

It's possible to simultaneously promote the change you want to see in the world, and promote coping strategies for the transitional period.

The idea that we shouldn't need to deal with the status quo, but expect the world to conform to our whims instantly is unreasonable.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#240

Post by rygine »

thejameskyle wrote: post #198
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…

I got to work on Lerna for about two months while working at Cloudflare in order to ship cf-ui. Otherwise it was in the middle of a period where I mostly backed out of doing open source because of frustration with the community from early this year. So if Cloudflare hadn't done that I probably never would have gotten involved. I'm sorry I was often short-breathed when responding. I'm sorry I shut people down more tha…

James,

Thanks for the reply, and the apology. Your situation really sucks, and I hope it gets better with time.

Please consider taking a break from some of your projects.

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