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

> you don't have space for detailed (and possibly constructive) criticism, you substitute witticisms because that's what gets retweeted (i.e. what the environment rewards). Maybe you read another snarky tweet just before and want to one-up it. Maybe you just worked on some messy code and are a bit frustrated and this looked like the right place to vent.

And that's basically what we shouldn't do.

Don't know, but possibly because you're derailing the discussion.

The outrage is not about constructive (or even unconstructive) criticism of the code itself (which appears to be fine): At least one of the guys ridiculed the author and questioned her competence for the sole reason of implementing a subset of the features of GNU find+sed on top of Node.js.

I looked at the actual code and, although I'm no expert with Node, it looks pretty reasonable. The only things I can find to criticize was the word "replacize", which makes me cringe much like "performancing" or "optimizely", and the use of == instead of ===. But I think reasonable people could disagree about those things. Someone who isn't me might think "replacize" is sufficiently humorous to retain, for example.

The nesting goes a little deeper than I would like: https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L9... is 7 indents deep, for example, where I think something like 4 indents is a place where I should stop and start questioning what I'm doing. But three of those indents are a tradeoff forced by the node.js async API: anything that has to wait on the result of an asynchronous operation must necessarily be in another function, and you can choose whether to nest that function deeper or to move it somewhere unrelated and give it a name; and you have to use error codes instead of exceptions for error handling from those operations.

The program actually includes a synchronous version of the same code, where the line corresponding to line 90 above is https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L1..., the blank line following "var text = fs.readFileSync(file, "utf-8");". If that fails, it throws an exception, so the "if" block isn't needed, and the code that follows doesn't need to be nested.

This is the agony and the ecstasy of Node: everything is (normally) asynchronous, giving you unwanted levels of nesting, but on the other hand, everything is asynchronous, so you can process the files in the order that the filesystem finds it most convenient to return them to you in. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Heather's code was typically much, much faster than find | xargs -P sed, simply because it was able to productively manage many more outstanding I/O requests at once.

Line 90 also points to a pitfall that often befalls us with parallelism: at some point parallelism stops being productive, so you have to limit it. In this case, Heather's code throws the ball back to the user and suggests that they rerun their command in synchronous mode — albeit having partially completed the replacement task, which might be a bad failure mode, depending on whether your replacement is idempotent.

I've seen way worse than that. I've probably written way worse than that. I wish I knew where to find it.

> The former is about trying to change our society to make it more just, the latter is aimless introspection.

On the contrary, the former is something we probably won't change [1], while the latter is almost certainly something we can change.

> The comment was a bit of a troll and not insightful so I trolled back. If this were not pg's website, I am certain you wouldn't be defending the statement because it lacks substance.

I seriously doubt he was trolling, and you shouldn't be so certain. This being pg's site is completely irrelevant in this case [2]; I'm simply ... actually, disgusted is about the best adjective I can think of to describe how I feel about the nonsense arguments on HN lately. People seem to be in some kind of a hurry to disagree, because they aren't actually reading and comprehending what other people are writing, they aren't stopping for a moment to consider that perhaps the person they're responding to isn't an idiot or a troll, they aren't maintaining basic principles of civility, they're commenting on (and arguing about!) subjects that are way outside their expertise, and they seem to be nearly drooling at the chance to engage in a witch hunt.

For example, nothing in my reply was a defense of pg's statement. Nothing. Not a single word. The entirety of my reply was a tutorial on high school level reading comprehension and a snide remark about HN (well, and a question about you). So, how is it that you interpreted that as a defense of his statement?

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[1]: I may yet be pleasantly surprised. I certainly wouldn't've guessed at how much press the Aaron Swartz case would end up getting, and there is some small chance now that it might end up causing some kind of change somewhere. That would be great. As of yet though, it has changed absolutely nothing.

[2]: Assuming of course that you don't find it significant that the founder of one of the programming communities on the internet is indicting the community's behavior -- although it's not clear if he's referring to the HN community or the broader programming or technical community.