Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dear JavaScript

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–248 of 248 posts

Re: Dear JavaScript

#241

Post by __derek__ »

fooey wrote: post #165
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…

Someone saying "Angular 2 is terrible" really isn't that harsh. If you're going to get all worked up over something that slight, maybe doing work in public isn't the way you want to spend your time.

This approach assumes that the natural/default state of the community is unconstructive negativity (e.g., the title "Angular 2 is terrible"). The point here is that many people (especially the people behind big projects) reject that assumption. So, on the contrary, maybe it's the people who refuse to show empathy who should disengage from the community.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#242

Post by __derek__ »

kowdermeister wrote: post #54

There is no "fix" to this. This is how people work. Some like things some don't, you have to deal with it or look for a more secluded hobby. If you can call it a hobby. Maybe behind every angry post there is a frustrated developer who've thought or been told that XY framework "is-the-shit" and and it will rock the way he works. Then he tries it and faces a series of problems. One consequence might be that he feels st…

The first paragraph has the form of the common "toughen up" response to this post, but you hit on the important point: framing matters. Offering constructive criticism is pointless if it's offered under some salt-the-earth banner (e.g., "Angular 2 is terrible"). Empathy costs very little yet helps very much.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#243

Post by 65827 »

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…

Yeah clearly if we just get a little bit more elitism and condescension in the software communities of the world the problems will go away!

Re: Dear JavaScript

#244

Post by SamReidHughes »

pcwalton wrote: post #137
pavlov wrote: post #5

I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind. Is HN really that bad? I mean, it must be, if people maintaining popular open source projects think so... But why does it feel much m…

> Is HN really that bad? I recently had someone here say I should be given "a prison sentence of several decades" for working on Rust. And no, they were not joking. To be fair, the comment in question got flagged off the site, but the point remains that it very much does happen here.

Whew! And by working on Rust you've already committed years of hard labor, you should at least get credit for time served.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#245

Post by jdd »

joshmanders wrote: post #211
algesten wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember this behaviour is encouraged by the deprecation warning notices of npm. I want my project to compile cleanly, but without me changing anything, from one day to the next, I may face a bunch of warnings because some maintainer somewhere decided they have a fresher version (lodash, pug/jade, node-uuid etc I'm looking at you).

Change your npm log info to just errors. Warnings don't mean your build broke, just that the version of a dep you installed is no longer supported and if you want bug fixes to upgrade.

:clap:

Re: Dear JavaScript

#246

Post by [deleted] »

jdd wrote: post #245
joshmanders wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Change your npm log info to just errors. Warnings don't mean your build broke, just that the version of a dep you installed is no longer supported and if you want bug fixes to upgrade.

:clap:

[deleted]

Re: Dear JavaScript

#247

Post by jdd »

yegortimoshenko wrote: post #94
thejameskyle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep assuming I have something against sharing criticism or frustration. I never said that. I explicitly said that's not what I'm trying to say. I'm saying that when someone does it in a way that is in pure unadulterated anger that the community should not reward them for it. It's unhealthy for everyone.

I don't think you understand. The critique itself, whether constructive or not, is something to learn from. Just like breaking changes in Babel 6. There is a lesson waiting to be learnt, namely, don't make breaking changes to existing software. As a matter of fact, I honestly don't understand why you take it so personally. Sometimes I do stupid things and people call me an idiot, and it's helpful to know that. Someti…

I dig Babel 6. I'm glad they took the major bump, which allows breaking changes, to improve things.

The major bump means it's opt-in, so folks can continue to use the older version without breaking their workflow.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#248

Post by monknomo »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #221
monknomo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, and they drive the direction of the community, but they are also a miniscule minority
Post reply on HN