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What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

harthur.wordpress.com

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Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#381

Post by raverbashing »

tptacek wrote: post #221
mrb wrote: post #200

Heather, I agree that people are unnecessarily rude to you. Don't sob. Your code shows you are already a more capable programmer than most of the ones I interview. No one has given you a clear answer as to why your code is reinventing the wheel, so allow me to do it politely. I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, m…

I've been coding since 1993 and I have never made room in my brain for stuff like -print0. Moreover, there are times when you'll want to do this stuff from within another program. What are you going to do, shell out to a find(1) pipeline? Then people like me will be giving you shit. There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in Javascript.

Yes, find options are very strange, and it's certainly flexible, still, the learning curve is steep going beyond the basics

Still, someone probably rewrote something similar to sed in JS

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#382

Post by cowboyhero »

kenneth_reitz wrote: post #302

I'm so tired of this. In honor of harthur's efforts, and to take a stand against bullying, I've decided to fork the project. I'm currently porting it to Python! https://github.com/kennethreitz/replace I encourage others to do the same in their respective languages :)

Nice! I posted a similar sentiment here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5108181

Perl or PHP, because why not?

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#384

Post by aneth4 »

mrb wrote: post #200

Heather, I agree that people are unnecessarily rude to you. Don't sob. Your code shows you are already a more capable programmer than most of the ones I interview. No one has given you a clear answer as to why your code is reinventing the wheel, so allow me to do it politely. I took every single example from your README, and show you below how everything can be reimplemented with sed -r (nice extended regex syntax, m…

The clear answer is probably appreciated however the implication that reimplementing something needs to be "justified" is absurd, even setting aside the fact that the syntax you use is representative of the arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally horrible CLI of unix commands, and does not represent a good case against implementing a better interface. Open source is packed to the brim with "reimplementations," some out of ignorance, some for learning, some to improve, some to port to different languages, some for ego, some for principal, and some for many other reasons.

Frankly the code is hardly deserving of derision. It looks perfectly capable to me, and the syntax is far superior to arcane unix commands. Just because you'd rather write a sed wrapper than write this code doesn't mean it makes sense to deride others for trying to move the human race forward.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#385

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

kamaal wrote: post #355
mrb wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then write it once and share the wrapper script on github. No?

C'mon we are long past the days where tools had to written in $somelanguage. These are days where even things like compilers and databases are not being written in C. If its of any help I think its time for the Unix community as a whole to sit down and self reflect. If people are beginning to think something like 'sed' as too level to use, then better job needs to be done to make them more accessible and usable. Ther…

I respectfully disagree with you here. The beauty and the wonder of these small command line tools (for me, at least) is that they are a) small and b) fast and c) ubiquitious. I do a lot of data manipulation, and while I'll do anything complex in a real programming language (with a REPL) sed, awk, grep and find are really really handy for quick data finding and manipulation.

Any new API on top of them would only be present on a fraction of machines, and thus would reduce the major advantage of them in that they are available everywhere.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#388

Post by drothlis »

keeperofdakeys wrote: post #354
lloeki wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing wrong with rewriting sed in [X] Indeed, especially since there's sed and sed . The examples given use -i, but no luck with BSD sed, where you will use -i~ at best. Also, lack of -e before the expression may make things blow up at times. And the sed regex does not support stuff like +, so many times I end up replacing sed -i~ -e with perl -pi -e or ruby. Besides, sometimes your looping logic is not i…

> And the sed regex does not support stuff like + Are you talking about BSD sed here, because GNU sed does support + with the -r flag.

The problem is that it's hard to use sed portably, because GNU sed's "-r" is "-E" in BSD sed. (There's also the differing behaviour of "-i" as mentioned earlier in the thread.)

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#389

Post by te_chris »

mrb wrote: post #242
jongala wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To my (naive) eyes, your examples act as a compelling advertisement for her library. The sed/xargs/etc. examples look increasingly like impossible-to-memorize line noise to me, while the --include, --exclude etc. options in `replace` are comprehensible and seem to follow standard command line argument practices. Again, this is from a very entry-level unix tools perspective, but there it is. It also seems to me that r…

Impossible to memorize? I wrote all these examples from memory. I tested them in a shell and had a single error (sed -ir needed to be changed to sed -ri because -i takes a glued "suffix" argument). I really don't think it is that hard to memorize the basic find/xargs options. You only have to memorize them once in your lifetime. They are a basic cornerstone of a Unix skillset. By comparison, I often forget the custom…

It would appear they're the basic cornerstone of YOUR unix skill set. I spend all day in *nix, I didn't understand everything you wrote there.

Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project

#390

Post by phatbyte »

goostavos wrote: post #122
jrockway wrote: post #20

I don't really see the problem. I never remember sed syntax and instead just use perl -e. It follows that someone may want to use JavaScript instead though I would personally avoid JavaScript at nearly any cost. As for haters on the Internet, yeah, welcome to the Internet. If you do something, chances are someone hates you. Why? They are jealous that you are getting attention instead of them. They could write a bette…

>Welcome to the Internet. If you do something, chances are someone hates you. You know, this is really what we have to keep in mind, or at least try to any way. Doesn't stop it from stinging a bit when it happens though. Especially when they are the first kind of comment you receive when you show a project in a public forum. I usually expect a couple of 'Fuck you. My eye's are bleeding from your coding." style commen…

If I've learned one thing is that the Reddit community is not friendly. I swear to God, there must be a underground competition to who can bully and troll more users there.
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