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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

#391

Post by hardik988 »

I replied to @steveklabnik's tweet saying (https://twitter.com/hardikr/status/293819210965082113)

    "There's also a search command. It's like grep, but with replace's syntax, and slower!" Wow - I'm sold!
If it was not clear, I was just kidding - and I apologize if my tweet and caused her any sort of distress. I'm just a novice in the open-source world, and I really respect harthur for her contributions to open-source. I was just "smiling" about Javascript's use to replicate grep. In fact, it is my Github everyone should be laughing at - it is filled with small useless scripts, and really terrible code.

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

#392

Post by sid6376 »

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.

I looked up what print0 does as I use find and xargs a lot.

Here's what print0 does - it separates the filenames with a null byte so that names containing spaces and newlines can be interpreted correctly.

Hopefully someone else will find it useful.

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

#394

Post by jacalata »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #268
benatkin wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's autism that must run rampant and that it's underdiagnosed partly because people have called it Asperger's which doesn't seem as serious. With the new version of the DSM this won't happen as often.

There is a huge gulf between Asperger's and full blown autism. People with Aspergers are "normal" people in the sense that they are generally capable of looking after themselves, communicating and working normal jobs etc People will full Autism have severely limited communication skills (often no spoken or written language skills at all beyond repeating a handful of phrases) and require a significant amount of assist…

I thought Asperger's was being removed from the new DSM, so it's all autism now?

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

#395

Post by pavanky »

adrr wrote: post #306
readme wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if that's the same thing. Linus usually criticizes things in a way that actually points out the flaws. This guy is just essentially saying "LOL U SUCK"

LOL U SUCK. Kidding, though some of the threads I read involving C++/C with Linus involved are so childish they are actually entertaining. Example: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/5791...

"Some of the threads"

goes ahead and provides one link everybody here has read by now

does see or mention context

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

#396

Post by jakejake »

It strikes me as the OP is a new-fangled node.js programmer who unwittingly stepped into shell-script land and felt the judgmental wrath of those who dwell there.

This post has a lot of conversation which I take to mean it touched a nerve with a lot of people as it did me. I grew up when computer nerds were not cool and a lot of guys dealt with it by being self-righteous, condescending assholes. I thought those days were behind us now that computer guys and gals are off getting rich and running the world. But clearly the need to feel superior still exists in some communities. It bums me out to see people who otherwise do good work with such a mean-spirited attitude.

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

#397

Post by f4stjack »

Github is not a beauty pageant. We do not write code for the people to evaluate them aesthetically. What we do, however, is to learn and teach. What we did to solve that problem and if there are others, they may use our solution as a step to solving their similar problems or better, they may offer a better solution.

What did these tweets add to the so-called "eye bleeding" code? What did they teach? What did we learn from all of these?

If I was in Heather's shoes, I would feel anxious whenever I sync to my public repo in Github. Or anxious whenever I code, worry whether this code is "beautiful" enough. And, folks, no one has any right to make a person feel like this.

I don't mean "no there shouldn't be any criticism on github" on the contrary, if you have something constructive to say, go ahead and shoot. I would not make a repo public if I don't want to see my mistakes, improvement starts with realizing what a mistake is.

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

#398

Post by alexhektor »

kevinalexbrown wrote: post #195

Then I see these people’s follower count, and I sob harder. I can’t help but think of potential future employers that are no longer potential. There's a big responsibility that comes with being well-liked and nice. When someone with a good reputation and the means to broadcast it speaks negatively about someone, it matters much more than someone who is routinely rude, frequently negative, or unknown. I know that if t…

tl;dr: With great power comes great responsibility.

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

#399

Post by chris_wot »

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…

Guess you've never heard the KISS principle. So what if you can remember arcane commands? If there was a "replace" program, I'd be sure to use it. I understand all of these as well, trying to pipe them together or to use a "replace" command - I'd choose replace every time.

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

#400

Post by cjg »

Domenic_S wrote: post #269
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear hear! I've had a sed book on my shelf for years and I've used it more than once, but 99% of the time I end up giving up on sed and using a GUI-based tool instead of trying to concoct the cryptic lines given above as examples. I absolutely would rather use the clean interface of replace, written in JavaScript or anything else, than to memorize that steaming pile of cruft.

Two reasons why it's better to memorize the cruft: 1. You can pipe find/sed/grep/cut/awk/whatever to other utils. Today you might be replacing, tomorrow you might be analyzing text logs, and the more core utils you learn the more things you can do with them. 2. When you're ssh'd into another box that doesn't have that spiffy replace utility, now you don't know how to do an inline replace.

Your argument that it wouldn't be available on other boxes can be applied against any new command, no matter how fantastic, so it doesn't seem very constructive to me.
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