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

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

#441

Post by chris_wot »

peterwwillis wrote: post #359
tptacek wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, if this were intended for doing it from within a JS program. But it's not. It's a command-line tool. To replace the best, most powerful, most flexible, most stable tool (and additional tools) made for the command-line for this exact purpose. This is the definition of reinventing a square wheel. It's just a bad idea. (p.s. by using xargs (with or without -print0) you can use one option to parallelize the functio…

I'm not going to downvote you, but you've not really put your case. Using replace simplifies the workload for a lot of people, the commands (which incidentally, I actually like using) is still somewhat arcane even to the most experienced Unix guru.

If you can replace a long line of pipes with a simple command line, then why not?

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

#442

Post by pekk »

doktrin wrote: post #411
Domenic_S wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. Fair. This boils down to an individual's needs. I think most people in a position to be making this choice are fairly well aware of what's possible with standard nix CLI tools, and can decide whether or not to…

You actually do hear this brought up as a case against dotfiles and vim plugins, even the use of vim as opposed to vi. There is just this school of thought which says you should never use anything which isn't in a default CentOS install.

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

#444

Post by hythloday »

cpeterso wrote: post #331
lengarvey wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally a weasel apology would be: "I'm sorry If I made someone feel bad" Not "I am sorry. I feel terrible that I made someone else feel terrible." Corey's apology did feel nicer, but I don't think that Steve's was a bad apology.

In his "apology", Steve says three times that he was "accidentally" an asshole. That doesn't sound very sincere.

He also talks more about his feelings than the person he's apologizing to!

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

#445

Post by kyberias »

mirsadm wrote: post #373
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different because Mauro is talking on behalf of the Kernel and claiming obviously bad changes are good ones. Linus is reprimanding a subordinate that is supposed to be one of the most well-informed members of the Linux community as a kernel maintainer -- he's not criticizing a stranger for posting a tiny script in case it "might be useful". Linus is DFL (not so benevolent sometimes) of Linux, and can lash out when on…

Be that as it may he was a complete dick. I wouldn't want to work with someone like that, no matter who he is.

You don't have to. Then again, that's not a criteria for anything.

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

#446

Post by mrb »

doktrin wrote: post #362
mrb wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you have such a strong objection to someone spending their own free time to simplify and / or mimic [insert unix tool functionality here]. It clearly serves a purpose and it's apparently useful. Most importantly, it exists , so there's no need to argue over how you think it should have been implemented. I'm sure if you were to release your own [script / wrapper], someone would find use for it, in the same mann…

I know it someone's right to do this, of course. I object because I come from an environment (software industry) where I have spent hundreds of hours undoing people's poor jobs where they wasted time and money reimplementing (incorrectly) library functions, system commands, etc. Because of this personal experience, I reacted the same way many reacted when seeing her script. So, I decided to explain to her and attempt to convince her that she should have spent her time and skills on something else (especially because she seems a rather good programmer!) Does it make sense?

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

#447

Post by pekk »

lobotryas wrote: post #421
confluence wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can write complex vector math in C from memory - doesn't mean everyone needs to be able to do it. That replace library does what it's supposed to do - it replaces shit easily. Don't like it - don't use it. If people want to do more - then they'll figure it out for themselves. For everyone who already knows more - eat some humble cake.

>Don't like it - don't use it. This is a false dilemma and completely misses the point. The replace library was written by a person who either never heard of or never learned how to use SED. Just because they created their own hack as a workaround doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

Just because it does something that you like to do a different way, doesn't mean it is hurting anyone for someone to write it.

By this logic, there is no way for beginners to write much of anything since there are existing implementations of almost any idea, and it should be disallowed ever to make a new thing which could replace any old thing.

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

#448

Post by simonh »

I have an application I've been working on for about 5 years. I started it as a way to learn desktop and object oriented programming, and it's now grown to something like 10,000 lines of code. There have been long periods of 6 months or more when I've not touched it, then gone back in and get started again, as a result the code base is a bit of a mess. The coding style is a bit haphazard and it includes a fair sprinkling of ugly hacks.

But by and large it works and would make a decent alpha release. There are a few bits of functionality that need to be made more robust, which I'm working on now, and when that's done I'm going to bite the bullet and load it into Github. I've implemented a plugin system so users can customize it, and tried to do my best to make that part of it as consistent and clean as possible.

I do worry that uploading this thing could cut both ways. I'd like it to get some use, but I'm very aware of it's flaws. I wonder home many projects never get released because the authors are worried about this kind of reaction.

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

#450

Post by chris_wot »

chris_wot wrote: post #426
zeeg wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, still here. I'm just not replying to you on Twitter because lol

Don't expect you to - you read it, good enough for me to know you did :-) Thanks for letting me know. Your entire blog post is a big "The Internet disagrees with me": http://justcramer.com/2013/01/24/being-wrong-on-the-internet... You said something in 140 characters that was snarky and mean, that's actually not easy to do to be honest. And then you got called on it, and now you are getting criticized. Not nice, huh?

Actually, you know something... I correct myself. It is easier than I realised. I'm not sure that would be a skill I'd be proud of...
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