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Dear JavaScript

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Re: Dear JavaScript

#81

Post by striking »

dandelany wrote: post #68
striking wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, but this doesn't address those community issues. It doesn't talk about the changes that these devs will have to make to keep up with the times. I don't have anything to say for Babel, as I'm not a user of it. But I remember the anger of the Angular community as Angular 2 was announced. No one could believe that they would eventually choose to leave behind Angular 1, that they'd have to nearly rewrite their apps…

Honestly I feel that most FOSS projects would lose very very little if the most vocal complainers somehow vanished overnight. The angriest users are the ones that understand the least and contribute the least. Of course there are legitimate issues with nearly every FOSS project, and civil people complaining about them legitimately, and we should work to address them. But we should not be pandering to the most petulan…

Well, that's fair. If someone steps majorly out of line, time them out or ban them. I'm not saying you should pander, I'm saying you should empathize. (Within reason.)

That being said, exclusion is a very powerful tool, one best used with caution. It's easy to mistake temporary anger for constant trolling. It's very easy to ban someone who falls into that sort of gray area.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#82

Post by throwanem »

to3m wrote: post #26
throwanem wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is HN really that bad? It seems like there are some people trying to drive it downhill in a hurry - I know it's fashionable for anyone who's been on HN for any time at all to say it's going downhill, but turn on showdead for a while and see if you don't start to feel the same.

But this is why you leave showdead off.

I leave it on because sometimes there's a comment which makes a salient point, isn't a dupe, and for whatever reason is dead anyway - maybe the user is shadowbanned, I don't know. I'd rather be able than not to see and vouch for such comments when they occur, but I certainly don't blame anyone for not wanting to see all the garbage that comes along with enabling showdead - which is most of what it lets you see, in any case.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#83

Post by hankmccoy78 »

striking wrote: post #38
Mouq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

See, but this doesn't address those community issues. It doesn't talk about the changes that these devs will have to make to keep up with the times. I don't have anything to say for Babel, as I'm not a user of it. But I remember the anger of the Angular community as Angular 2 was announced. No one could believe that they would eventually choose to leave behind Angular 1, that they'd have to nearly rewrite their apps…

Sure, people trying to use libraries and frameworks to make their living absolutely get frustrated for often legitimate reasons. But we're supposed to be professionals and as such we should have the self-control, skill, and empathy to channel our frustration into productive feedback instead of just venting our anger like an out-of-control toddler.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#84

Post by yegortimoshenko »

> When we launched Babel 6, we made an API change that we had planned for awhile. We moved from having an implicit (“works out of the box”) behavior to an explicit (“will work for everyone”) behavior.

Just like Rich Hickey said in his last talk (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085952), breaking changes are broken. For greater good or not, it's no surprise people complain when you break their code/workflow.

> I want to talk to you about an article that was written the other day titled “Angular 2 is terrible”. For starters, that title alone is an attack on the maintainers. Surely the author wants a set of problems addressed. But why should the maintainers want to even click on that link, let alone try to address the problems?

I too think that Angular 2 is terrible. It is not an attack on the maintainers, it is just a piece of (IMO) bad technology with maintainers feeling attached to it.

It is a very crucial skill in life to be able to withstand critique and take it to your advantage. There is a lot of usually unnoticed utility hidden in critique, waiting for someone to reap its benefits.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#85

Post by dandelany »

striking wrote: post #81
dandelany wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I feel that most FOSS projects would lose very very little if the most vocal complainers somehow vanished overnight. The angriest users are the ones that understand the least and contribute the least. Of course there are legitimate issues with nearly every FOSS project, and civil people complaining about them legitimately, and we should work to address them. But we should not be pandering to the most petulan…

Well, that's fair. If someone steps majorly out of line, time them out or ban them. I'm not saying you should pander, I'm saying you should empathize. (Within reason.) That being said, exclusion is a very powerful tool, one best used with caution. It's easy to mistake temporary anger for constant trolling. It's very easy to ban someone who falls into that sort of gray area.

Just to clarify - I'm not suggesting we make liberal use of the banhammer for anyone who steps out of line - there are other ways of changing behavior that will work better. Just considering the hypothetical where they don't exist :)

Re: Dear JavaScript

#86

Post by thejameskyle »

fusiongyro wrote: post #50

I don't want to distract from the main thrust of the article, which was that we should be decent to each other even with our criticism, but I think both his examples (Babel 6 and Angular 2) had something in common that lead to a lot more anxiety: they changed the essence of the software in a way that a major version bump is not enough to communicate. I'm speaking especially of Angular 2 here. It's essentially a compl…

The change in Babel 6 was this:

   $ npm install babel-cli
   $ babel src -d lib
To this:

   $ npm install babel-cli babel-preset-es2015
   $ echo '{ presets: ["es2015"] }' >> .babelrc
   $ babel src -d lib
It really wasn't that big of a change.

Also, we did give it a new name. It used to be 6to5, and we changed the name around the intention to make it more generic. Which Babel 6 was the culmination of.

As for communicating with the community. Yeah, we can't address everyone at once or even reach them all. We could shove it in their face (and we do) and still a significant portion would still ignore us (and they do). There's not much we can do about that. But they shouldn't come to us and say that we never said anything about this, because yes we did.

Also, the article I referenced about Angular 2 was not talking about the transition from Angular 1 to 2. It was talking about ng2 as its own thing, criticizing it's design more than anything (just in a really shitty way).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#87

Post by mikemcquaid »

OskarS wrote: post #10
pavlov wrote: post #5

I’ve always been advised to avoid these “sub-communities” like /r/javascript and Hacker News. Maintainers say they are filled with assholes who don’t know what they are talking about, angry idiots shouting at everything and everyone, cesspools, giant piles of trash burning in the wind. Is HN really that bad? I mean, it must be, if people maintaining popular open source projects think so... But why does it feel much m…

Check out this comment from one of the devs behind Homebrew from HN 10 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13035438 (this was in response that he might be a good target to sue over putting Google Analytics in Homebrew). Yes, we need to treat our open source devs better. HN is not innocent.

Thanks for bringing up this example and calling it out as unacceptable. I appreciate it (and I'm sure other OSS maintainers do too).

Re: Dear JavaScript

#88

Post by atemerev »

magicalist wrote: post #75
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 a…

I do sincerely apologize if something I had said sounded offensive to you or anybody else.

However, I can't help but ask the question: am I the one who resorts to personal attacks here?

Re: Dear JavaScript

#89

Post by thejameskyle »

yegortimoshenko wrote: post #84

> When we launched Babel 6, we made an API change that we had planned for awhile. We moved from having an implicit (“works out of the box”) behavior to an explicit (“will work for everyone”) behavior. Just like Rich Hickey said in his last talk (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13085952 ), breaking changes are broken. For greater good or not, it's no surprise people complain when you break their code/workflow…

People keep assuming I have something against sharing criticism or frustration. I never said that. I explicitly said that's not what I'm trying to say.

I'm saying that when someone does it in a way that is in pure unadulterated anger that the community should not reward them for it. It's unhealthy for everyone.

Re: Dear JavaScript

#90

Post by tnones »

I understand the author's frustrations. Open source is lovely when it works, and communities can be fun when you're part of them. But I understand the other side too. Most people don't care, and they shouldn't have to care, yet they are told to regardless.

The flipside to all this griping about entitlement is that most open source ecosystems are set up as an explicit groupthink and infrastructure to which you must defer. You can't just grab something and keep playing by yourself, no, you must keep moving in lockstep with everyone else, or things will break. That's why people get frustrated and angry, and that's why they barge into issue queues feeling miffed. They gave up too much control to too big an entity, and it bit them in the ass. Angular 1 should be a big lesson here: people abandoned the entire framework in droves simply because the _promise_ of future updates was taken away. The beautiful carriage turned back into the pumpkin it always was, and now the rot was starting to set in.

Even something like node.js with its fractally versioned npm packages has this problem. Drop-in compatibility is only true as long as you're in the sweet spot of doing what most other people do, on the version most widely installed. Not too bleeding edge that you can't expect StackOverflow to have gotten there before you, but not too far behind that you lose compatibility with the important dependencies.

The author concludes "If we focus on solutions, focus on helping others, focus on sharing ideas, we’ll be in a better place." I disagree, because too much sharing is what got us into this mess. The answer is more self-sufficiency, with enough affordances for going at it by yourself if you want to. Alas, that doesn't jibe with the latest fad of inclusiveness, so I'm afraid the same people griping about civility are the ones doomed to recruit more ineffective members into their congregation.

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