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

31–40 of 248 posts

Re: Dear JavaScript

#31

Post by 20years »

I think part of the problem is junior developers think they need to use these frameworks for every project, which results in frustration and running around in circles. They then blame the framework or developers because the framework wasn't really right for their use case or doesn't give them exactly what they want.

Maybe the community needs to do a better job at communicating best use cases for these frameworks.

Are you developing a Gmail type app with multiple devs? Okay, maybe an Angular type framework is a good option.

Are you developing a simple CRUD app? Probably not the best to use a heavy framework then. A framework in this case may actually slow you down.

Single page apps and frameworks are not needed for everything. Probably not even needed for most web apps that people are using them for.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#32

Post by Mouq »

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…

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.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#33

Post by shanemhansen »

I think there's a fundamental mistake the author is making. Sometimes complaints about frameworks are not directed at framework authors, but at users. Sometimes people need to be warned away from bad software.

Specifically the author references a NG2 article that is trying to warn developers, not bash maintainers. https://meebleforp.com/blog/36/angular-2-is-terrible

Re: Dear JavaScript

#34

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

zeveb wrote: post #30
rohannair wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many HN posts about JS devolve into a "I don't like Javascript because I'm a real programmer, not a frontend" slugfest. As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.

> As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology. If a lot of people are so negative about it, is it worth even considering whether they might be correct? Is it not ideological to refuse to do so?

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

Re: Dear JavaScript

#35

Post by JustSomeNobody »

OskarS wrote: post #10
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…

Check out this comment from one of the devs behind Homebrew from HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438 (this was in response that he might be a good target to sue over putting Google Analytics in Homebrew). Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.

What is wrong with these people? Why do they treat people like this? Why is it these people always seem to jump to the big three [0] in protest of something they don't like? Are they that childish they can't express themselves in a more humane and intelligent way?

One hears about this seemingly regularly. It needs to stop.

[0] Nazi, murder, rape

Re: Dear JavaScript

#36

Post by detaro »

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 ecosystems and are shrinking. Stack Overflow has a low tolerance to badly asked questions and a reputation for it (and probably killed the message boards that dealt with them before).

Initially, it makes sense that questions go to Github (public, no extra infrastructure needed, no community yet), but at some point they have to be moved. Even a %project-questions repository might help, if enough non-core-devs take care of it.

EDIT: to add to the last point: if a core contributor has to click the "close issue" button on a question that's a problem. Either give community members the power to do so (at least some are going to feel honored by that, a great motivation), or push questions to a channel that doesn't have that notion.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#37

Post by JustSomeNobody »

rohannair wrote: post #9
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…

Many HN posts about JS devolve into a "I don't like Javascript because I'm a real programmer, not a frontend" slugfest. As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.

Oh. I thought it devolved into "Use react".

Re: Dear JavaScript

#38

Post by striking »

Mouq wrote: post #32
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…

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.

See, but this doesn't address those community issues. It doesn't talk about the changes that these devs will have to make to keep up with the times.

I don't have anything to say for Babel, as I'm not a user of it. But I remember the anger of the Angular community as Angular 2 was announced. No one could believe that they would eventually choose to leave behind Angular 1, that they'd have to nearly rewrite their apps to be compatible. This made people angry. I believe they might still be. And I don't see a point like that addressed in the story.

I don't have an answer for you on how to fix this. There are many people that consider the A2 switch to have been necessary, so "don't do stuff like that" isn't necessarily even an answer.

But my point stands. People get angry, for better or for worse. Logically or irrationally. You can't just "call out" that behavior and expect it to get better. You need to better understand and empathize with those people, and work with them.

I don't believe this piece is helpful. I think it paints with too widely a brush and ignores the legitimate criticisms that the community is making.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#39

Post by zeveb »

Has the author considered that maybe, just maybe, negativity can be justified? Sometimes when one sees people wasting yet another man-decade in yet another attempt to make JavaScript not fundamentally broken the only thing that can possibly work is to say, 'your project is stupid, because you're trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.' If reasoning doesn't work, if polite criticism doesn't work, then maybe being direct will work.

Or maybe not. I generally try to reason through this kind of thing. But after awhile one realises that if every programmer has to learn why JavaScript and single page apps are both fundamentally and accidentally broken, then thousands of years of cumulative programmer effort will be completely wasted. Maybe it'd be faster just to say, 'that's stupid: do it this way' and short-circuit the whole process. It'd be even better to say, 'that's ill-advised, here's why, and here's how to do it better.' But if the other part won't listen to the long explanation and doesn't wish to learn — then it seems to me that the last-ditch mechanism is rudeness.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#40

Post by codezero »

Does anyone have any suggestions on alternative communities that are more positive?

Reddit and HN are easy because they are pretty consolidated, my best guess is that these other communities are small and hard to find.

Post reply on HN