Better shit code that gets the job done than beautiful code that gets nothing done
What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
741–750 of 826 posts
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#742Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Code is never personal. Whatever I say about your code has nothing to do with you. I've heard this repeated ad nauseum (not just in this thread) and I think it's total crap. You cannot tell me that if you spend dozens of hours writing something then someone comes along and goes line by line telling you how what you wrote is an abomination that you're not going to have an emotional response. If that's the case it ha…
Of course the code we write is deeply personal. I think that what he means, however, is that the _criticism_ of code he gives is based solely on the code itself, and doesn't contain any inherent bias based on the author. He's saying "this code is crap" because of objective reasons that he (in theory) holds himself and others to as well, not because he thinks the author is a bad programmer.
People just don't work that way; at least, I don't.
Who reads code without thinking of the author? When I'm derailed by a bug in some library I'm depending on, or see code that works in a way I find unintuitive, clunky, etc., I absolutely think judgmentally about the person who wrote it.
When I'm reading someone else's code and find a solution that's significantly more elegant than I was imagining, I'm impressed by the person's accomplishment, and they basically get points in my head. If I meet them in person I'll quite possibly shake their hand a bit more warmly.
This is normal and natural, and I have to consciously counter-balance that with the learned (but not instinctive...) knowledge that I've written bad code myself, released buggy or clunky code, taken questionable shortcuts, etc..
When I'm in a position to criticize someone else's code (and it's part of my job to do it sometimes!) I usually rewrite my feedback a few times (and sometimes decide it's not needed at all) before writing or speaking to the developer, because it takes a lot of conscious thought to modify my instinctive response into something more fair and effective based on what I've learned over the years.
That's my experience.
Does everyone else actually think that differently?
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#743Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another reason to reinvent the wheel: $ replace "Foo" "Bar" is common sense and easy to understand. Not to mention that sed -i is a GNU extension. I haven't used replace but it seems like a pretty innocent piece of helpful code for someone who likes JS.
I actually had something similar myself, a shell function called findRE, the entire purpose of which was to automate searching a given path recursively for a given regex. However I used it so infrequently that whenever the need would arise, I would invariably screw up the order of the 2 (only 2!) arguments. I could have added support for --help, --usage or similar, but that seemed like overkill. I eventually just lea…
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Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#744Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, I think you ended up really making the case for replace. The nix CLI examples are convoluted at best. I've used CLI tools for years, and it would probably take me 5-10 minutes of scanning the man pages to reproduce all but the simplest of those snippets. Granted, this boils down to the sporadic use-case, but that's the entire point. The replace examples are all clean. It would mean I would not be juggling l…
Then take the 5-10 minutes to scan the man pages. Write a simple shell script wrapper exposing a syntax as simple as "replace". And be done with it in 15 minutes top. It seems to me that writing all this js code would take a lot longer than 15 min.
Who cares how long it took the author? The API is what matters. And I personally think her API beats the snot out of obscure sed, awk,and grep compositions.
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#745Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine, but saying "this code makes my eyes bleed" is very obviously meant to demean the human being who wrote the code, not the code itself.
I honestly don't see that. It insults their coding ability, or at least their focus when coding that particular thing, but disparaging a single skill that a person has is not being demeaning to that person. At least in my mind.
That's pretty much what demeaning means, though.
It's not "a single skill" as if you were telling Torvalds that his juggling skills were crap and he should keep his day job; if someone has enough coding experience that they're releasing OSS on GitHub, coding is quite likely their job (or they're in school to make it their job).
So yeah, snarkily saying that the product of someone's career activity makes your eyes bleed (or whatever) is demeaning to them -- i.e., directly attacking their dignity and others' respect for them.
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#746Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly don't see that. It insults their coding ability, or at least their focus when coding that particular thing, but disparaging a single skill that a person has is not being demeaning to that person. At least in my mind.
That's pretty much what demeaning means, though. It's not "a single skill" as if you were telling Torvalds that his juggling skills were crap and he should keep his day job; if someone has enough coding experience that they're releasing OSS on GitHub, coding is quite likely their job (or they're in school to make it their job). So yeah, snarkily saying that the product of someone's career activity makes your eyes ble…
Their dignity should not be dependent on their job area being flawless. Thinking they screwed up on a single hobby project should not cause a loss of respect for the person.
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#747Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a fine line between being critics (constructive) and being assholes (destructive). When hiring, be sure to differentiate the two.
No, it is a very thick line. Save for a few situations where you might question whether what you said was misconstrued, people for the most part know when they're being civil or not. "I'm just a straightforward guy", "I tell it like it is", and "I don't want to sugarcoat" are ways people justify being an asshole by acting as if they've got your best interests at heart and genuinely want to help. They damn well know h…
A great quote I once heard is that people who claim they are just being "brutally honest" seem to be motivated by the brutality more so than the honesty.
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#748Heather, 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…
ack-grep does quite a lot of this as well.
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#749Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, David Cramer is a total asshole! That Steve Klabnik guy is also an asshole. The only one who doesn't appear to a complete dick is Corey Haines, whose apology was better. Not great, but better. Here's the thing - if you ever even consider saying things like this to someone on the internet, you're an asshole. It's not a one time accidental thing. Nope, it's in your personality. I hope I never meet either of these…
>Wow, David Cramer is a total asshole! That Steve Klabnik guy is also an asshole. Since we are talking about insults, reputation and constructive criticism: Does HN think the quoted text is appropriate? Personally I think it is about on par with "makes my eyes bleed".
To be fair, that criticism is backed up by evidence. Whereas the main reason harthur's code made their "eyes bleed" was because it was written in node.js.
Re: What It's Like To Be Ridiculed For Open Sourcing A Project
#750Earlier quoted context omitted.
The majority of HN readers seem to have assumed that the author is male. I assumed the same thing for most of it, before getting suspicious at the non-joking use of "sobbing". I wouldn't be surprised if these Twitter posters made the same assumption.
The thing that bothers me is that some people changed their tone after they found out she was a woman and after they read her post. This speaks volumes more than the original comments. If anything it seems there's an implication that somehow women are unable to cope with jackasses as well as men. Would it have even made HN at all if she was a man and wrote the same way? I doubt it, but if it did, and she was a he, he…
I just wanted to point out that (hopefully) these Twitter guys were posting because they truly disliked the project, rather than out of misogyny as the GP speculates.
It bothers me too when people here and elsewhere assume every single negative comment or piece of criticism directed at a woman is due to misogyny, and that somehow women should be "no criticism zones" or something. I really like when people maintain gender anonymity online, because it keeps comments and feedback at a gender-blind level.