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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

#41

Post by nesquena »

sharkbrainguy wrote: post #25
brotchie wrote: post #14

There exist two types of people: 1. "Hur hur, sed piped with other tools already does this, you loser, why did you waste your time?" 2. "Cool, a different take on sed written in Javascript. They've written some basic doco and made a npm package, I might try it." Ignore #1 online and in-person, be friends with #2. People who adhere to type 1 behaviour are alien to me. I fundamentally don't understand what their motiva…

I think you've excluded the middle here, (#1.5 perhaps) one who thinks that your code is worthless/dangerous and does not call you a loser. It can be true that a piece of software is a poor replacement for an existing tool. It can be true that recommending it as a replacement for that tool is dangerous. You can make these judgements about a piece of software without an incident like this happening. What's important h…

Yeah I mean it's OK to make judgements and think or believe whatever you want. Maybe even tell how a friend or two how silly something seems to you while hanging out. It's a different thing to being a dick to someone publicly on the internet for trying to contribute positively to open-source.

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

#42

Post by flatfilefan »

brotchie wrote: post #14

There exist two types of people: 1. "Hur hur, sed piped with other tools already does this, you loser, why did you waste your time?" 2. "Cool, a different take on sed written in Javascript. They've written some basic doco and made a npm package, I might try it." Ignore #1 online and in-person, be friends with #2. People who adhere to type 1 behaviour are alien to me. I fundamentally don't understand what their motiva…

I guess the point of the #1 is they may be trying to hit you with a clue. sometmes not in a most efficient way, hurted feeling stay in the way of learning.

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

#43

Post by mintplant »

> Steve Klabnik ‏@steveklabnik

> @harthvader @zeeg nothing's _wrong_ with it, but I don't want to build my app on top of others' code who are at this level of understanding

This message [1] in particular is absolutely disgusting. Someone hacked together a script that met their needs, and threw it up onto GitHub in case anyone else found it useful? Yes, let's take the opportunity to condescendingly insult their mental competency.

What does he even mean by saying that he doesn't "want to build my app" on top of harthur's code? Nobody asked him to; steveklabnik himself made the original post, taking the opportunity to show off this smug sense of superiority.

[1] https://twitter.com/harthvader/status/293829635823792128

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

#44

Post by ollysb »

arcatek wrote: post #2

I'm curious : what is the use case for this utility ? If I look at the README, it says : > Modifies files when matches are found Just like sed's -i option (except that -i allows you to specify a backup extension just in case) > Recursive search on directories with -r I usually use find with sed, so it's not so much a problem (and it actually allows to filter the files by extension, exclude directories, etc, which is…

$ find ./ -type f -exec sed -i 's/ugly/beautiful/g' {} \;

vs

$ replace 'ugly' 'beautiful' . -r

I can definitely see the value here

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

#45

Post by arcatek »

PuerkitoBio wrote: post #4
arcatek wrote: post #2

I'm curious : what is the use case for this utility ? If I look at the README, it says : > Modifies files when matches are found Just like sed's -i option (except that -i allows you to specify a backup extension just in case) > Recursive search on directories with -r I usually use find with sed, so it's not so much a problem (and it actually allows to filter the files by extension, exclude directories, etc, which is…

Yes, you are missing something. The features of his utility is not the point.

Well, if someone says "So wrong that it doesn’t even need to be explained", I assume that saying some of the reasons which would lead to the bad reviews is relevant.

However, I agree that it doesn't address the second point of the article which was the useless rudeness. But developers are (helas) known to be very rude people. That's not the first article talking about it.

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

#46

Post by doktrin »

jlongster wrote: post #36

What the fuck. (And I rarely say that word.) We've got to grow up. This is 9th grade all over again. You know, those weird people that do things that you don't understand? They're the ones that grow up and make big impacts on the world. Why can't we get over our negativity? We can't stop ourselves from thinking horrible things, or even saying them out loud to people around us, but surely we can restrain ourselves fro…

>> If I ever start a company the #1 thing I will look for in others is positivity. I wouldn't stand for this crap.

What's conspicuously lacking here is not positivity per se, it's the absence of civility & decency. Those are two very different sets of attributes.

Lack of an outright positive demeanor won't sink a team. Lacking civility and decency, however, will stick a severe wrench in any project.

edit : On a personal note, reading this was unpleasant and embarrassing. I'm sorry the OP had to go through this.

edit 2 : retracting the following statement after reading apologies published by those involved - "I'm glad I now know who not to interact with in the community"

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

#48

Post by btown »

sharkbrainguy wrote: post #25
brotchie wrote: post #14

There exist two types of people: 1. "Hur hur, sed piped with other tools already does this, you loser, why did you waste your time?" 2. "Cool, a different take on sed written in Javascript. They've written some basic doco and made a npm package, I might try it." Ignore #1 online and in-person, be friends with #2. People who adhere to type 1 behaviour are alien to me. I fundamentally don't understand what their motiva…

I think you've excluded the middle here, (#1.5 perhaps) one who thinks that your code is worthless/dangerous and does not call you a loser. It can be true that a piece of software is a poor replacement for an existing tool. It can be true that recommending it as a replacement for that tool is dangerous. You can make these judgements about a piece of software without an incident like this happening. What's important h…

> It can be true that recommending it as a replacement for that tool is dangerous.

Unless you're suggesting that NASA rewrite its rocket guidance subroutines in a brand-new interpreted language or something, it's probably not unequivocally "dangerous." (In that case, I would call the suggester a different word than "loser".) That's the whole point of open-source software: everyone can make their own judgments about what works better for them.

In the specific case of `replace`, if I want to know exactly what the command-line options do, exactly what order the files are being modified in, I can glance over 173 lines of javascript rather than search through the 4.3MB (uncompressed) of the sed source code. Sure, I suppose I'd have to include the Node.js source code to make it a fair comparison, but my point remains: choose the solution that makes the most sense to you.

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

#49

Post by jjm »

luigi wrote: post #12

Here's the Twitter discussion alluded to in the post: https://twitter.com/harthvader/status/293829635823792128 Main justification is the nicer syntax. I agree it's nicer, but would approach it by wrapping sed, not re-implementing in Node.js from scratch. I don't think that excuses the ridicule, though.

The maximist point of view is to wrap sed, yes. But what also came to my mind was what if he/she just wanted to only learn, I can think of no better way than to try to write it 'yourself' in the language of your choice, if only as a learning exercise.

All to often we in technology assume the maximist point of view, possibly completely discounting another dynamic point of view or some inspirational reasoning (of the originator).

*edit: spelling

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

#50

Post by morpher »

brotchie wrote: post #14

There exist two types of people: 1. "Hur hur, sed piped with other tools already does this, you loser, why did you waste your time?" 2. "Cool, a different take on sed written in Javascript. They've written some basic doco and made a npm package, I might try it." Ignore #1 online and in-person, be friends with #2. People who adhere to type 1 behaviour are alien to me. I fundamentally don't understand what their motiva…

I agree with this mentality. Its best to just ignore the #1-types out there. Of course, that doesn't remove the sting. I don't use node, so this doesn't fit in my toolchain.

However, I wanted to commend the author on the nice simple interface. In particular, I like the highlighted output showing the changed lines in all files. This is one thing that sed -i doesn't do (although I guess you could cobble it together with sed's backup feature and diff).

Anyway, don't get discouraged by the haters!

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