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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#71

Post by monknomo »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #46
carsongross wrote: post #12

In the vein of "Worse is Better"[1]'s MIT/New Jersey split, my theory is that the online javascript community reflects a lot of what I would call the San Francisco/UI Design attitude (in contrast with, say, Java, which reflects the Palo Alto attitude.) The SF attitude is more driven by fashion, marketing and art/design world factors and less by raw commercial or technical aspects. This introduces a lot of subjectivit…

I disagree. A lot of technical design goes into JS projects. React is designed in a Herculean effort to minimize DOM refresh and thrashing. JQuery was built to fix very real problems: API incompatability between browsers, and extreme verbosity in common idioms. Babel is a compiler, with all that entails.

The users of these libraries benefit from this herculean effort of very real programming, but are mostly not the herculean programmers.

The users are the community, not the library creators. And the users are mostly, from what I see, the arty designy web dev types.

That doesn't take away from the real problems, or the tricky design or difficulty in building a compiler for the community.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#72

Post by atemerev »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #70
atemerev wrote: post #51

Dear James, I understand that hearing rants about your brainchild that took so much hard work is hard and depressing. I was in your shoes, too. And being a head of popular open source project is very emotionally unrewarding, to say the least. And thank you for your hard work — like nearly every front end developer out there, I used Babel, and it did it job, eventually. However, I am one of those people who think that…

Ummm... You do know that you don't have to use Babel to use JS, right? ES5 is here, it was here then, and it works very well. It might have some pointy ends, but they are very well documented at this point.

Yes, of course, unless you had invested a lot into React/JSX, and Babel is the only "official" way (documented and blessed by Facebook) to run React and JSX in production.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#73

Post by thejameskyle »

usurpers wrote: post #44
thejameskyle wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume I was being paid to work on Babel. I was not. I worked on the UI team for Cloudflare, where we didn't even use Babel until earlier this year shortly before I left. I worked on open source on the weekend. The vast majority of open source maintainers are not paid in anyway whatsoever. Conferences pay me to fly places and stay in hotels because they make a profit off of me. Even now as I am paid to do open so…

> You assume I was being paid to work on Babel. I didn't assume that. This post isn't about Babel, it's about the "JavaScript community", which you are being paid to work with. > The vast majority of open source maintainers are not paid in anyway whatsoever. I know. I'm one of them. I spend ~20 hours a week on open source on top of my full-time job. I know how stressful it can be, but I'll never complain about it bec…

I wasn't saying that people don't have a right to be frustrated or angry. I wasn't saying we shouldn't voice our criticisms as developers or that we shouldn't disagree with one another.

The only argument I'm really trying to make in this article is that when someone has stepped over a line into outraged attacks on tools and authors that the community shouldn't reward them for that.

Apparently this is too much to ask because so far today I've been called:

- a special snowflake

- autistic

- whiney

- thin-skinned

- pathetic

- weak

And I only published this like 2 hours ago and I have hundreds of notifications to go through still. The next few days I'm probably going to get a hell of a lot worse. Still waiting for my first "faggot" which always inevitably happens.

I have some pretty thick skin. I was raised in an abusive environment and I made my own way in the world at 16.

I'm not bothered by one person saying I'm an idiot.

What gets to you is a few thousands people agreeing.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#74

Post by zeveb »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #52
zeveb wrote: post #39

Has the author considered that maybe, just maybe, negativity can be justified? Sometimes when one sees people wasting yet another man-decade in yet another attempt to make JavaScript not fundamentally broken the only thing that can possibly work is to say, 'your project is stupid , because you're trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.' If reasoning doesn't work, if polite criticism doesn't work, then maybe b…

...But that's not even what he's talking about here. He's talking about people continually insulting him and his project over the internet, without even discussing the grievances they may have, legitimate though they may be. Also, JS isn't as fundamentally broken as you think. C is far more fundamentally broken than JS, and you like C, right? I mean, I kinda like C, too. But it's broken.

> Also, JS isn't as fundamentally broken as you think. C is far more fundamentally broken than JS, and you like C, right?

Heck no! I think that the existence of C has set the fields of information technology, operating systems and computer science back by at least 50 years (yes, longer than C has existed: it's that bad).

I don't hate K&R or any of the other folks involved with C and its descendants; I don't think that they were actively malicious. But I think that their work has inadvertently made the world worse than it could have been.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#75

Post by magicalist »

atemerev wrote: post #51

Dear James, I understand that hearing rants about your brainchild that took so much hard work is hard and depressing. I was in your shoes, too. And being a head of popular open source project is very emotionally unrewarding, to say the least. And thank you for your hard work — like nearly every front end developer out there, I used Babel, and it did it job, eventually. However, I am one of those people who think that…

> However, I am one of those people who think that Babel6 is terrible, that it "broke the web", and it marked the beginning of the entire JavaScript fatigue era. Babel6 transition took three days of my life, filled it with misery and rage, lost me a customer, and led to my desire to never touch JavaScript again if I can help it. (I moved to ScalaJS eventually).

Bad news: you are not a special snowflake deserving of attention, the web is still here and doing just fine, and it was your incompetence that lost a customer (Babel 5 is still around for use even today).

Many mistakes can be made by open source teams, and something should not be immune to criticism just because it is open source. But this is a great example of noise that harms engagement in a community because you want to feel good on the off chance that lashing out will make someone somewhere feel bad.

Maybe try to learn from a piece instead of trying to be cute next time?

Re: Dear JavaScript

#76

Post by rhinoceraptor »

atemerev wrote: post #51

Dear James, I understand that hearing rants about your brainchild that took so much hard work is hard and depressing. I was in your shoes, too. And being a head of popular open source project is very emotionally unrewarding, to say the least. And thank you for your hard work — like nearly every front end developer out there, I used Babel, and it did it job, eventually. However, I am one of those people who think that…

Did babel force you to upgrade right when version 6 came out? They bumped the major version, that should be a pretty clear indicator that existing workflows will break.

Whenever you use a tool, you're accepting risk for the reward you're getting from it. If I run Gentoo on my servers, it's not really fair to complain when an update breaks something.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#77

Post by thejameskyle »

beejiu wrote: post #66

I think it works both ways, too. Unfortunately there are some developers that take any form of criticism as negativity. Some time ago I discovered a major XSS security vulnerability in a very popular WordPress plugin (used on over 100,000 blogs). I notified the author and got it fixed, and published a blog post about the issue 12 months later. The article itself was entirely factual and described the nature of the is…

I can't read the article so it's hard to say. But if it was just about the security vulnerability and you weren't calling their software shit, then that's not what I'm trying to cut away at and I'm not sure why the author took it so personally.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#78

Post by ggregoire »

The people who appreciate your projects and would love to thank you everyday for your amazing work are the silent majority.

See Font Awesome 5. When they announced the KickStarter on HN, a minority criticized the existing library (like how the lib is shitty) or their future plans (like how having a pro version is wrong). But at the end, they raised almost $1 million. That shows how the biggest part of the community is really thankful.

If FA5 can raise $1M, I can't even imagine how much could raise Babel, Webpack or Homebrew. You made our lives so much easier.

---

Also, can't recommend enough this book:

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life - https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitiv...

Re: Dear JavaScript

#79

Post by jasode »

Mouq wrote: post #32
jasode wrote: post #19

> But when someone starts to insult me in mock my hard work, when they criticize me and my work in a way that is extremely negative, it gets to me. That seems to be the essence of his entire essay. He wants people to be nicer. Yes, criticism is often necessary and often motivates progress, but the criticism should be nicer. Well, that's an ideal but his lament isn't limited to Javascript specifically. Nasty complaini…

Ok, but he's specifically calling out communities that reward negative behavior rather than calling it out. I mean, are you being serious right now? There's a difference between "boo hoo everyone's so mean :'((" and "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address", and that's pretty explicitly the point of the article.

James Kyle wrote:

>There’s a lot of these “sub-communities”, places like /r/javascript and Hacker News that often reward negativity more than positivity.

and you write: "hey, there are community issues that we should try to address",

Ok... so exactly how do we address it? Do we repeat, "From now on, let's all be nicer with more positive energy and feedback!"

Ok, now that we've done that, is the problem solved? Why not?

You see, negativity in complaints about others' work is universal. Before the internet, scientists had been slinging mud at other scientists' work in prestigious journals. During the heydays of Usenet we had nasty Lisp debates. And now, we have have rants about Babel6 and Angular2 that's a killjoy for the maintaners. As Captain Louis Renault would say, "I'm shocked gambling is going on in here!"

On a related note... I recently read about autism and a book discussed some of the debates of parents caring for an autistic child. You'd think that an environment like that would foster the ultimate empathy and positive feedback (compared to Javascript projects) ... but no.... some parents are quite mean-spirited in criticism of other parents' therapy methods. To think we can somehow "solve" the problem of Javascript programmers' negativity about OSS projects seems naive.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#80

Post by allendoerfer »

dandelany wrote: post #60
allendoerfer wrote: post #41

I do not think that every blog post about a piece of software has to have actionable advice for the maintainers. Sometimes you just want write a review and tell other people that something sucks. It is true, that this is a community where people are working for free and I would personally try to consider that, when I say something online. It is generally good advice to assume, that other people are intelligent, too,…

The thing is, a Hollywood movie is qualitatively different than a FOSS library. In the former case, you are a passive consumer who paid money for a product. In the latter, you are an active member of the JS community, benefiting from the shared work of other developers for free - the only thing they're asking for in payment is a bit of kindness, respect, civility and ideally the occasional contribution. Plus, if ther…

> The thing is, a Hollywood movie is qualitatively different than a FOSS library. In the former case, you are a passive consumer who paid money for a product.

Not in my example. Not even talking about Hollywood. Could also be indie and crowdsourced, just like FOSS can be sponsored by the biggest companies on the planet.

> In the latter, you are an active member of the JS community, benefiting from the shared work of other developers for free - the only thing they're asking for in payment is a bit of kindness, respect, civility and ideally the occasional contribution.

Sure, and that would be the right thing to do. Still he mentions, that he has stopped working on a project for being criticized for ASCII art. I do not know the specific case and mostly I do not care enough, but it annoys me, too, when developers try to be exceptionally funny and clever inside code - especially when they fail. So I think you are allowed to criticize something like that, if you want to.

> Plus, if there's something wrong with the FOSS project, you have ultimate power to change it as you see fit.

Does not apply to criticism about design decisions.

I think reviews (sometimes) have a value in itself for the reader and help to create a working market of FOSS, where the best library gets the most users. I get the developers point of view and can imagine how he feels, but playing devils advocate here lets me conclude, that saying something sucks is okay.

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