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Dear JavaScript

• Crystais 10y ago
  You get paid extraorbitant sums of money to sit in a chair and think about imaginary problems. You don't stand and work all day. You don't change the world in any way. You sit at a computer and punch keys all day, and you have the audacity to bitch and moan about your precious feelings when you havent worked a hard days work in your entire life. You're literally an adult crybaby.
• dweinus 10y ago
  I think there is a lot of truth here. I can't help but feel that you just diagnosed a great deal of the internet, far beyond javascript or dev. We need better communities and better communication. I wish I knew how to make that actionable.
  • kilroy123 10y ago
    Agreed. I also think this touches upon a larger issue outside of development. There is something about being behind a keyboard that makes people much nastier than they would be in real life.
• vuanotinw 10y ago
  Grow a thicker skin, faggot. Or just don't publish your code at all if you can't take the mean comments on the internet.
• pavlov 10y ago
  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 more useful to me than a "pile of trash burning in the wind"? I guess my experience as a commenter is so different because I've learned to tune out the negative stuff and it's not aimed at me.
  • rohannair 10y ago
    Many HN posts about JS devolve into a "I don't like Javascript because I'm a real programmer, not a frontend" slugfest. As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology.
    • zeveb 10y ago
      > As someone who is invested in the long-term success of the JS ecosystem, it becomes a lot easier just to remove yourself from the discussion because a lot of the community is so negative about the (older versions) of the language and ecosystem, purely on ideology. If a lot of people are so negative about it, is it worth even considering whether they might be correct? Is it not ideological to refuse to do so?
      • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Of course it's worth it: we've considered it, and we think you're wrong.
        • striking 10y ago
          Or not even just that one is particularly "wrong", but that it's a matter of opinion that is differently valid to different people. That's as much reasoning as you can do on the scale of an entire language, without getting more concrete about your arguments. edit: also, "ideological" is unfair. We know JS isn't godlike. We use it regardless.
          • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
            That was more or less my point. So thanks for clarifying it.
      • dwaltrip 10y ago
• juice_bus 10y ago
  I remember reading that Angular 2 thread and walking away disappointed with the baby-like, nonconstructive screaming. (disclaimer: I'm using NG2 and enjoy it). This article has reminded me that there are people behind these projects, even the ones I don't like.
  • Bahamut 10y ago
    In general, even if you don't like some things about projects, it's worthwhile investing time to see if you can learn from it for down the road. I'm an expert in the Angular ecosystem, but I experiment with other frameworks to learn & get the most I can. The author of that terrible Angular 2 article didn't even try to understand the system he was working in. As an open source maintainer (UI Bootstrap/ng-bootstrap)/contributor (Angular 1 & 2, Universal Angular, UI Router, Ionic, karma), I respect those who work on other projects, even if I disagree with approaches. We need to have less holy wars and more constructive discussions instead, and demand more from fellow developers to foster this atmosphere. I've been guilty of using emotional language in the past, but time has led me to mature in this aspect - it would be nice to see everyone else make this jump as well and join us in making software better for all.
• throwayawnotime 10y ago
  I strongly suspect that the competitive environment in Javascript frameworks and :s/tool/fool/ing is the main source of the negativity: Trolls have the explicit agenda to demolish/demotivate what they're trolling in order to push their own project/framework.
  • moron4hire 10y ago
    This is a really shitty thing to say, which you clearly understand. The 90/9/1 comes in to play here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture) I have found that even sites like HN don't skew significantly far from this. As users, we can't know who the 90% of people are who read this site and never post. But there are definitely 9 times more people commenting than creating. As an open source project maintainer myself, I have absolutely zero time to go talk shit about my competitors, even if I had shit to say about them.
    • polotics 10y ago
      In my observation, one troll can and will show up under many different identities, so there may be a 90/9/1 rule, but it can be gamed.
  • wnevets 10y ago
    Much like the fanboys of the console wars. It's so much about their "side" winning they get upset when a game isn't an exclusive.
• jmcdiesel 10y ago
  As with seemingly ever problem over this last few years, this just comes back to the same basic problem. Entitlement. People feel entitled that your library works the way THEY want it to work. They are entitled to feeling that changes you make should agree with THEIR project workflow. They feel entitled to complain when its not exactly what they want. Entitlement is going to be this period in time's label...
• carsongross 10y ago
  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 subjectivity and, as with the art world, snobbery, vicious infighting and out-grouping. Much of the online shittalking reminds me of the various post-war -isms trying to box out the other groups. There are, of course, many things going on: the rise of the online troll, increasing churn and chaos in the javascript community, bifurcation into the haves and have nots in technology, even the recent presidental election and the attendant insecurities. But this is what I see. [1] - https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html EDIT: and I should say, I fall victim to exactly what the author describes when I'm going off on one of my YAGNI react/angular rants.
  • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    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.
    • monknomo 10y ago
      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.
      • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        But the people behind those libraries are part of the community.
• usurpers 10y ago
  > It almost feels like you’re a politician at times. Because that's what he is. He's a self-chosen software politician who admits he loves his job. He's paid to travel the world and interact with his constituents. But he is upset that his audience sometimes writes a blog post, or worse, nominally approves of adding an arbitrary number to a database associated with a blog post. Somehow this is construed as a problem with the community. It seems the community is functioning as intended, and grievances are being hashed out. However, the author does not want to deal with the challenges of listening to and interacting with the people he is being paid to interact with.
  • woah 10y ago
    Is he being paid?
  • thejameskyle 10y ago
    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 source. I don't think a single person on my team would expect me to tolerate people yelling at me. I'm not a politician, I can and do ignore plenty of people. Most of the time negative people arent saying anything useful anyways.
    • usurpers 10y ago
      > 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 because it's my choice to be involved. I'll definitely not be complaining about it if that 20 hours was something I was being materially compensated for. > Conferences pay me to fly places and stay in hotels because they make a profit off of me. Yes, this is how business works. Work is exchanged for tickets and advertising. Part of the work is being a presentable and knowledgeable speaker who can effectively engage and relate to the problems expressed by the audience. > I don't think a single person on my team would expect me to tolerate people yelling at me. If there are people harassing you that is indeed a problem -- get the police involved. That seems a completely separate issue from what's discussed in this post though, which is a community that sometimes discusses technical arguments in a way you consider abrasive.
• datashovel 10y ago
  I think the context everyone needs to start taking with internet comments / blogs / etc. is that "everyone can be part of any open community". The other important thing to take is "everyone can voice their opinion". This, if the majority of us really dig deep, is what we wanted and why we invested so much time / energy into the web. I would say that only in recent years has it felt like the most ignorant are really starting to ratchet up their rhetoric. I still see it as a truly powerful thing even when it can / is used destructively. Also, given the ad-driven world of online, my guess is a large number of "relatively intelligent" rants we see online ramp up their tone only to drive more traffic. It's sad state of affairs, but true. My belief is the internet is still very much a meritocracy. As long as good work continues, it will continue to get well-deserved attention and praise. The thing that is changing and the way I think we (oss contributors in general) need to adapt is by making sure we don't let the noise rattle us. EDIT: In terms of how the particular issues arose (backlash) for Babel 6, I would say the only thing you'd probably want to do is assess the project's methodology for how word gets out and how easy it is for people in the community to participate in discussions of changes that will affect users. Perhaps making it explicit on the project websites which channels are "official" channels where the project's work occurs. In the end decisions / progress needs to be made. If everything is done as "above board" as possible given resource constraints of the project, don't ever let the backlash make you feel so guilty that it might change your mind about whether to contribute. Those who are the loudest are probably the least involved and sadly the most dispensable. Of course you don't want to think in those terms, but I think it's a lot worse to try too hard to appease loud / ignorant / uninvolved community members. That is probably the main thing that will lead the core team to want to disband the project altogether.
• nkw 10y ago
  I was commenting to a colleague the other day how amazed I was at the sheer quantity of github "issues" that I was seeing posted to a few popular open source repositories that were rants about why feature X wasn't available yet or a priority yet, or demanding that someone walk them through some installation issue because the poster couldn't understand (or didn't read) the README. None of the people that posted this stuff appeared to have ever contributed to that project (or any project), but thought they were entitled to what were essentially support requests or re-tasking of developers to meet their demanded schedule. Our discussion eventually thought it was due to two things: 1) Github, while making the open source process visible and easy to use for many, also makes the process pretty open and barrier free to people who may not yet have the technical (or social) ability to meaningfully contribute to a project; what once would have required posting to a dev mailing list is now just a couple of clicks; and 2) a cultural mindset that some people seem to have that free or open source software is some kind of entitlement (or at least due to communication issues, and the ambiguity of the written word on the Internet that is how I thought it came off). I think the sheer volume of freely available amazing software has caused some to forget the whole reason we have this stuff is someone somewhere spent a lot of time working on it and then decided to give it away. I don't know if this is really a javascript thing, but I think it manifests itself there more than others simply because javascript might be the first place a lot of people start in their career/learning.
  • detaro 10y ago
    regarding your first point: often there doesn't seem to be a dedicated support channel/community. Mailing lists are less and less popular, if one exists its web interface is likely a long way behind GitHub. There are no forums. Some languages have project-independent channels (e.g. message boards for python users will try to help you with whatever library you're messing with right now), but they don't exist for all ecosystems and are shrinking. Stack Overflow has a low tolerance to badly asked questions and a reputation for it (and probably killed the message boards that dealt with them before). Initially, it makes sense that questions go to Github (public, no extra infrastructure needed, no community yet), but at some point they have to be moved. Even a %project-questions repository might help, if enough non-core-devs take care of it. EDIT: to add to the last point: if a core contributor has to click the "close issue" button on a question that's a problem. Either give community members the power to do so (at least some are going to feel honored by that, a great motivation), or push questions to a channel that doesn't have that notion.
• xamuel 10y ago
  Apologies to the author, but rants serve a purpose. They comfort those of us forced to use a framework we don't like. If they demotivate you, that's your problem, not the world's. Move your site to Facebook if you want nothing but likes.
• jasode 10y ago
  > 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 complaining is part of the universal human condition. Instead of "Dear Javascript", it's more like "Dear All of Humanity" ... stop being so mean-spirited. In the same vein, we could generalize BS's quote: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -Bjarne Stroustrup ... to ... "There are only two kinds of github projects: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." -every maintainer
  • Mouq 10y ago
    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.
    • striking 10y ago
      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 to be compatible. This made people angry. I believe they might still be. And I don't see a point like that addressed in the story. I don't have an answer for you on how to fix this. There are many people that consider the A2 switch to have been necessary, so "don't do stuff like that" isn't necessarily even an answer. But my point stands. People get angry, for better or for worse. Logically or irrationally. You can't just "call out" that behavior and expect it to get better. You need to better understand and empathize with those people, and work with them. I don't believe this piece is helpful. I think it paints with too widely a brush and ignores the legitimate criticisms that the community is making.
• STRiDEX 10y ago
  I remember that angular 2 thread. Half of the problems were the breaking changes between release candidates. I was one of those early adopters, pushing my code along between releases. It was bad, but nothing I didn't expect. They talked about the changes and explained the motives clearly. I think the problem is people want to be bleeding edge without joining the community. Edit: question for James. What did you build with angular 2? Is it public?
  • wmil 10y ago
    I think that's something that hurt Ember.js early on. Their community was hyping each pre 1.0 RC / Beta but the public API was making breaking changes regularly. Too many devs got burnt.
  • thejameskyle 10y ago
    > What did you build with angular 2? Is it public? Heh, I build the same thing every time because I am not creative. Here's the Marionette version: http://marionettewires.com/ http://marionettewires.com/ I could put it out there. The problem is that people assume when I share something that I am trying to tell them how things should be, like I'm some software design #thoughtleader genius. When really I'm just blindly trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing.
• vorpalhex 10y ago
  It seems there are two things going on here. 1. Upset that people are now reacting negatively to this change as opposed to voicing criticism earlier 2. Being upset that criticism exists (2) is the sort of problem I can't help with except to say maybe grow a thicker skin or be a bit more aware of what it was you signed up for, but in regards to (1) - It's important to note that the people heavily invested in your project (enough to follow every new issue on Github and respond to them and have opinions) will be very different from your mainstream users. There is no shortage of people who heavily use a project and yet probably don't follow them in any way. So it's important to note that using that source of feedback likely subjects us to bias.
  • codezero 10y ago
    The argument that people should grow thicker skin is part of the problem. Why do we expect people to grow thicker skin rather than expecting them to be more courteous/civil? Edit: also the argument to grow thicker skin is seemingly ignorant of scale. Sure a few criticisms should be shrugged off but should thousands, which are disparate, incoherent and likely personally insulting, be part of the thick skin department? Where is the line drawn, and who draws it?
    • CaptSpify 10y ago
      Because thats how people are. Especially the general public. I absolutely think people should be nicer, but how do you encourage/enforce that? We've been trying for a long time without good results. I'm not saying that we can't fix it, but I haven't seen many attempts succeed.
    • vorpalhex 10y ago
      Should I, in making a critical statement, be denied because someone else (or maybe several other someone elses) already have? It seems a bit odd that if I'm a critic that my ability to exercise my freedom there is constrained by whether other people have.
• igotsideas 10y ago
  Some people tend to forget that a lot of time goes into all these tools and they are free to use. Some of these engineers spend time fixing OSS problems instead of hanging out with their kids. Good read..
• LyndsySimon 10y ago
  This sort of thing isn't unique to software. The same human behaviors that first-line tech support has to deal with on a daily basis are driving this; it's especially bad in F/OSS because it's often the case that the developers and the supporters are the same people.
  • CaptSpify 10y ago
    Very true. Having worked at a helpdesk, many calls were about how $new_software sucked. Most of that only got to the devs in a very generic form. They definitly didn't look at every complaint that was logged
• 20years 10y ago
  I think part of the problem is junior developers think they need to use these frameworks for every project, which results in frustration and running around in circles. They then blame the framework or developers because the framework wasn't really right for their use case or doesn't give them exactly what they want. Maybe the community needs to do a better job at communicating best use cases for these frameworks. Are you developing a Gmail type app with multiple devs? Okay, maybe an Angular type framework is a good option. Are you developing a simple CRUD app? Probably not the best to use a heavy framework then. A framework in this case may actually slow you down. Single page apps and frameworks are not needed for everything. Probably not even needed for most web apps that people are using them for.
• shanemhansen 10y ago
  I think there's a fundamental mistake the author is making. Sometimes complaints about frameworks are not directed at framework authors, but at users. Sometimes people need to be warned away from bad software. Specifically the author references a NG2 article that is trying to warn developers, not bash maintainers. https://meebleforp.com/blog/36/angular-2-is-terrible https://meebleforp.com/blog/36/angular-2-is-terrible
• zeveb 10y ago
  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 being direct will work. Or maybe not. I generally try to reason through this kind of thing. But after awhile one realises that if every programmer has to learn why JavaScript and single page apps are both fundamentally and accidentally broken, then thousands of years of cumulative programmer effort will be completely wasted. Maybe it'd be faster just to say, 'that's stupid: do it this way' and short-circuit the whole process. It'd be even better to say, 'that's ill-advised, here's why, and here's how to do it better.' But if the other part won't listen to the long explanation and doesn't wish to learn — then it seems to me that the last-ditch mechanism is rudeness.
  • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    ...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.
    • zeveb 10y ago
      > 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.
      • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
• codezero 10y ago
  Does anyone have any suggestions on alternative communities that are more positive? Reddit and HN are easy because they are pretty consolidated, my best guess is that these other communities are small and hard to find.
• allendoerfer 10y ago
  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, and assume "there are valid reasons for this" before "they had other things to do" before "they are stupid". Doing something for free however does not free you from criticism. Imagine a studio releasing a movie. Critics hate it, because it sucks. If the studio now sets the price to zero, does that automatically mean all critics have to be positive and friendly? No it does not. If something sucks, it sucks and you are allowed to write about it.
  • dandelany 10y ago
    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 there's something wrong with the FOSS project, you have ultimate power to change it as you see fit. IMHO reviewing FOSS projects as if they were shitty products you purchased is extremely destructive to the FOSS community.
    • allendoerfer 10y ago
      > 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.
• dsego 10y ago
  When you try to sell something as the next best thing since sliced bread, expect some criticism if it doesn't deliver.
• fusiongyro 10y ago
  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 completely different framework. You don't expect going from Postgres 8 to Postgres 9 that the underlying query language is going to be switched out for a different one. Regularly communicating with your users, as Angular and Babel did, only reaches the engaged part of the community. A lot of workaday programmers are not that deeply engaged. You're just moving their cheese, and it makes them mad. A better approach is to spin off a new system and give it a new name. This is what happened with Express and Koa, and it gives you a way to gauge whether people actually want the change you're making or not. I predict Angular 1 is going to be the Windows XP of front end development: lingering on for much longer than anyone expects. Slow and principled change is not a common thing in Javascript-land but it is what legions of software engineers expect. A lot of front-end development, like it or not, is being done by full-stack engineers or other engineers who are not front-end developers exclusively. Asking your echo chamber if they like your ideas is not really a sufficient sounding process, especially if you're making a deep cut.
  • thejameskyle 10y ago
    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).
• atemerev 10y ago
  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 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). I ranted about it, too. Like nearly everyone else, I forgot that there are live people behind every project, with their dreams, hopes and justifications for every decision. I didn't want to attack you personally — I just vented my (very real) rage against Babel6 itself, without thinking anything about its author. So, well, nice to meet you. And I still stand by what I said. Despite your good intentions, it is still terrible, and unintuitive, and definitely not a "something for everyone", unless frustration is something. And I can't think of any way of fixing it, except of moving to another stack (which I did). If there were many people ranting about Babel6 like I did, (and I can imagine), I am truly sorry for the mental suffering you had to endure. You are cool. You are significantly more competent developer than I am. I use your software, not the other way around. And it is free. But Babel6 is still terrible, and no input from your side can change my opinion. Or perhaps it could, if you provided some technical justification for what you did. But this article is the request to stop ranting about your work, as it hurts you. For that, I am sorry.
  • qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    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.
    • atemerev 10y ago
      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.
• kowdermeister 10y ago
  There is no "fix" to this. This is how people work. Some like things some don't, you have to deal with it or look for a more secluded hobby. If you can call it a hobby. Maybe behind every angry post there is a frustrated developer who've thought or been told that XY framework "is-the-shit" and and it will rock the way he works. Then he tries it and faces a series of problems. One consequence might be that he feels stupid, inadequate or incompetent. But there are some who dare to criticize. I thing that's a good thing. The moment when your mainstream project stops receiving criticism is probably the day it's dead. And by criticism I don't mean personal attacks (screw those idiots). By criticism I mean people with constructive feedback. The "angular 2 is terrible" article had plenty of it, besides the title it was a good read and insight how A2 really works. If you want to reduce developer frustration, then try these things first: - Write a clear scope what your project is about and how you intend it to used. Many times devs realize that the tool is a bad fit for them only after attempting to use it many times - Write exceptional, up to date documentation - Visually display core architecture explanations - Provide clear getting started examples that work out of the box - Communicate well breaking changes, updates, milestones
  • magicalist 10y ago
    Why would a project maintainer be expected to write "exceptional" documentation, have a clear scope for something they might still be exploring, give visual architecture explanations, etc etc and we can't expect developers to deal with frustration like an actual human?
    • kowdermeister 10y ago
      These project aim at the bleeding edge so if a maintainer sets the bar high, then it's expected to keep up with other aspects as well. Your work as a maintainer doesn't stop when the /src folder is full of code. Then comes the boring part. These things change from project to project and if a project gets more traction other people will join to fill the missing gaps. We can expect developers to contain themselves, but some just can't. They are precisely the ones who can't be stopped with any policy. Some are just in a bad mood and they also have graphomania, some are constructive some are mean. I think it's fine as is.
• ceedan 10y ago
  Sounds like OSS projects need a better way to moderate issues. If github had a setting to force issues to go through a moderator feedback/approval cycle before becoming public, it could reduce this behavior. Wouldn't help for Twitter and whatnot, but at least it would help somewhere.
• qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  I don't think I can say much about the article's main point that hasn't already been said. But I do have a question: Why the flying blue !@#$ would anybody think that Babel 6's Configuration over Convention decision was the wrong way to go? It was absolutely the right thing to do. It made Babel a far more uniform and simple piece of software, and actually made it easier to use. Why?
  • bshimmin 10y ago
    Most people use Babel for transforming ES6 into ES5. Before Babel 6, Babel did that out of the box with no configuration required. With Babel 6, it basically stopped doing anything out of the box, including the main thing it was famous for doing. While it is admittedly not a vast amount of effort to make it do precisely what it did before, I'm sure you can at least sympathise with people who found it strange that you have to include a "preset" to make it do the main thing that you expected it to do.
• rpeden 10y ago
  As others have pointed out, people being mean, angry complainers when something doesn't work the way they want it to isn't unique to the programming or open source communities. I think some of us are bothered by it because we tend to to think of ourselves as logical and rational, and we expect others like us to behave in the same way. From observing things over the past decade, it appears to me that there are plenty of developers who are willing to fly off the handle and write whiny rants about things that irritate them. Maybe part of it is that the posts that sound like they're written by a petulant child get the most attention. I often find myself disagreeing with points in them, but have never felt the need to spout insults about libraries and frameworks or their creators. Up 'til now, I've been content to reply to these rants on HN and Reddit, and try to inject a bit of reason and calm into the discussion. I think it's time to be more courageous. I'd like to start writing rebuttal blog posts in which I tell the authors they sound like whiny ingrates and demonstrate how they could have written their criticism constructively. I'm just not sure whether trying be be reasonable will actually help the community, or will just get me lots of nasty replies and e-mails.
• bjornlouser 10y ago
  "Some of the best [experiences] include being invited to conferences around the world to speak getting to travel to places I never thought I would and making friends from around the world." Are the motivations of maintainers aligned with the developers using their software?
• beejiu 10y ago
  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 issue, how I discovered it and what the fix was. Unfortunately, the author took this as a personal attack (the email he sent me made that clear) and I decided to take the post down. The thing is, I had actually spend many hours going through every single line of code to look for other security vulnerabilities. Sure, I hadn't written any code, and I wasn't the maintainer, but it was still an "open source contribution" in some sense.
  • thejameskyle 10y ago
    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.
  • qwename 10y ago
    Did you consult the plugin author before blogging about the vulnerability? Is there a reason why you blogged about it a year later? I am guessing that you waited until the old version of the plugin wasn't (widely) used any more.
• ggregoire 10y ago
  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-Counterintuitive/dp/0062457713 https://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Art-Not-Giving-Counterintuitiv...
• yegortimoshenko 10y ago
  > 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 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.
  • thejameskyle 10y ago
    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.
    • yegortimoshenko 10y ago
      I don't think you understand. The critique itself, whether constructive or not, is something to learn from. Just like breaking changes in Babel 6. There is a lesson waiting to be learnt, namely, don't make breaking changes to existing software. As a matter of fact, I honestly don't understand why you take it so personally. Sometimes I do stupid things and people call me an idiot, and it's helpful to know that. Sometimes it gives me a perspective I haven't thought of. Look at how Theo de Raadt and Linus Torvalds manage their projects. It is kind of the same.
      • 10y ago
• tnones 10y ago
  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.
• _asciiker_ 10y ago
  hey now ... "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." I find that HN has one of the most sober comment sections I could ever wish for, it's certainly better than Reddit. I mostly come here for the comments.
  • mrec 10y ago
    You can't really generalize about Reddit comment quality; it depends entirely on what you're looking at. Quality is strongly inversely correlated with sub size, so all the default subs are pretty bad. But there are notable exceptions to that correlation, like the consistently awe-inspiring /r/askhistorians
• jondubois 10y ago
  I dislike all JavaScript transpilers. I still cannot get my head around how CoffeeScript ever got so popular. The complexity and friction that transpilers add is not worth the tiny benefits that they offer. I've worked on many projects where I had to wait for like 20 seconds for the code to compile each time I made a change to it. From my point of view, it sounds like the author of this article is merely feeling the reality catching up to the hype. Transpilers like CoffeeScript and Babel should never have become popular to begin with. Something unnatural happened in the evolution of those projects which allowed them to capture a lot of attention very quickly; and much of the initial adoption was driven by hype and network effects instead of real needs.
  • rudolf0 10y ago
    Just to provide a contrasting point of view: CoffeeScript is the only reason I ever wrote, and ever write, JavaScript. Period. Transpilers do add a layer of complexity, but all of the syntax sugar advantages make it more than worth it to me. I would not ever write JavaScript if CoffeeScript or similar languages did not exist. Before it existed, I never touched the language. I now use CoffeeScript daily and have never been happier. A watchdog script automatically transpiles the code upon updates, and everything is completely seamless for me.
    • jondubois 10y ago
      The real problem that CoffeeScript solves is developer stubbornness. Some developers decided a long time ago that JavaScript is terrible and so CoffeeScript gave them a way to program in JavaScript without changing their minds about how terrible JavaScript is. The reality is that it would have been easier if developers weren't so stubborn to begin with.
      • rudolf0 10y ago
        It would have been easier if JavaScript weren't so terrible to begin with.
• rygine 10y ago
  I usually don't comment about these type of posts, but I felt I had to speak out here when the author of this article has been an offender of the things he's trying to promote. Perhaps he has just "seen the light," but I have my reservations. Specifically, these lines got to me: >If we focus on solutions, focus on helping others, focus on sharing ideas, we’ll be in a better place. We’re all part of a broader community and we all have an impact on it. We can either have a positive impact or a negative one. It’s entirely up to us. > This is the reality the community faces. We can either work to fix it or we can continue digging a deeper hole for ourselves. At my company, we were using Lerna [1], a library to help manage mono repos. It wasn't perfect, but it worked. So I thought I'd contribute. I spent a good deal of time replying to issues, fixing bugs, and working on new features. This was at a time when the author was mostly absent. Without the amazing help of gigabo [2] and hzoo [3], the project would have grinded to a halt. As new users rushed in to use this relatively new tool, there were many new issues and feature requests. When the author did make his presence known, he was not very helpful [4] [5]. These are just the examples that stood out to me as a contributor. Most people understand that 1 person can't be expected to maintain a big project like this, especially when they are busy at Facebook bootcamp. That's why it had 2 additional members to help. Unfortunately, as a result of [5] above, the author decided he no longer wanted [2]'s help and removed him from the project. He removed a huge contributor because he disagreed with him and failed to openly discuss the issue. Ironic. I stopped contributing immediately. As a result, Asini [6] was born. The thing that really pisses me off about this post from the author is that he's promoting open communication, sharing, helping others, etc... when it's the complete opposite of my experience with him. Maybe he just had a bad day on those days, maybe it was something else. I don't know him personally, I can only assume things based my interactions. Regardless, this was some extremely poor handling of an open source project. It looks like he's active on the project again, but it doesn't look like much has changed. [7] [8] [9] Mr. Kyle, if you're reading this, I really hope you'll follow your own advice. If I have misunderstood your actions in the past, I'm open to being wrong. [1] https://github.com/lerna/lerna https://github.com/lerna/lerna [2] https://github.com/gigabo https://github.com/gigabo [3] https://github.com/hzoo https://github.com/hzoo [4] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-228954543 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-2289545... [5] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/334#issuecomment-246393716 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/334#issuecomment-24639... [6] https://github.com/asini/asini https://github.com/asini/asini [7] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-252332281 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/255#issuecomment-2523322... [8] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/386#issuecomment-264072507 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/pull/386#issuecomment-2640725... [9] https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/408 https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/408
• jondubois 10y ago
  I'm the creator of a popular open source project (but not Babel-popular). I don't have a problem with people complaining about my work; if anything, I wish they would complain more - That way I would have a better idea about which parts need to be improved! I think that the author has no grounds to complain here; he's one of the lucky ones. I wish I was in his shoes and have people yell at me in desperation so that I could fix their problems (whilst travelling around the world). That sounds like a dream to me.
• forgottenpass 10y ago
  It felt like every day I had a notification waiting to be opened about how badly we had fucked up. It's interesting that the author phrases it this way, and dove tails nicely into a thought I've been having about interaction on the internet for a while. I don't say this specifically to the author, but generically, it's even something I'm working on being more aware of. Social tools and other apps have turned notifications into a Pavlovian variable-interval reward loop. This makes negativity even harder to handle. But seeing the system laid bare makes it easier to make decisions about. The notification loop sort of evolved that way with texts, but is also a purposeful tool of manipulation. We politely don't conceptualize it as "manipulation" because there is weight to that word, and we don't necessarily assume the app designer is acting in bad faith. But it's still manipulative. Think of it like this: Who _needs_ to be able to interrupt you every waking moment of your life? Then why are you letting a single person more? Disable notifications, and just set a recurring calendar event to check email/twitter/whatever.
• GoToRO 10y ago
  People are angry because you waste their time! Every single time you release some garbage but you write on the label that it's the next big thing people will lose time with it. And time is something you can not get back, no matter how much money you have. As an irony the only people that really profited from OSS are... the big corporations.
• marknadal 10y ago
  I thought I agreed but then I read this guy's pinned tweet thread, and he is being very demeaning of other people "Shut up David, no one likes you" https://twitter.com/thejameskyle/status/788799662438227969 https://twitter.com/thejameskyle/status/788799662438227969 (I don't care if he's being sarcastic or teasing, this isn't the attitude that makes people feel uplifted).
• johncoltrane 10y ago
  Poor little guy whom took a responsibility that was above is abilities.
• Kequc 10y ago
  This isn't to say people shouldn't ideally be nice to each other whenever possible. I'm so tired of hearing about how someone was slighted on the internet. Whatever it is you put out there will potentially be seen by up to 6 billion people. So "every day" you log in and see "yet another" negative comment? Grow up! There's no nice way to say that. There's going to be negative comments on the internet please please stop complaining about it. I've been hearing people complain about negative comments on the internet for years it is not going to stop. Find another way of dealing with it.
  • midasz 10y ago
    >I'm so tired of hearing about how someone was slighted on the internet. Deal with it?
• z3t4 10y ago
  The best way is to get a bunch of people to answer messages for you, and filter out personal insults. Also you do not need to read the news, it's possible to live under a rock and still write the best software. If you want to talk to other like minded, conferences are nice, and also IRC, there's always nice guys lurking there and if you write something interesting they will wake up, just be patient. Then there are community management, everything you say or write can be used against you, and there are trolls trying to make you look bad. The community can be very powerful if managed though, thousands of people can achieve a lot together. When you make something successful, people will love you, and we all want attention, so it will be hard not to become a public figure, but you're better off not to, because there will also be haters and if you make a bad move, those fans can easily turn into an angry mob.
• mwfunk 10y ago
  One reading of this is that people in open source JS community should be more professional, but I think you could make similar complaints about electronic communities in general. A blogger in 1999 writing about woodworking might have had similar complaints about feedback from random readers on the Internet. If you put anything out there on the Internet and encourage people to read it/use it/whatever, you will inevitably be surprised and repulsed by how nonconstructive and uninformed some of the feedback is. Web development might be worse than other fields in this respect because there's just that many more amateur, narcissistic, toxic teenagers (in spirit at least) who don't know what they don't know diving into it, who are going to be somewhat more focused on getting cheap upvotes on Reddit with angry rants than actually creating things. I don't know what the solution is. Some forums have higher SNRs than others, and while I often enjoy Reddit, I have no expectation that the people posting to programming subreddits are any better as a group than people who posted to Slashdot in 1999. If you do anything and tell anyone about it, some bonehead on Reddit is going to take issue with it and write an angry, uninformed, thoughtless screed about how everything is terrible and it's all your fault. You'll find some gems in places like Reddit as well, but it's just such a random stew of people that you have to take it all with a huge grain of salt. I agree with just about everything in the article, but given the number of Reddit quotes used as examples, part of the author's problem is taking Reddit too seriously or assuming that a given community on Reddit is a reflection of a larger programming community, whereas often the opposite is true. Oftentimes the people that post the most have the least to say, on Reddit (and the Internet in general), as in life.
• kazinator 10y ago
  > Hacker News often rewards negativity. Hacker News has a very good mechanism for combating negativity. However, the moderation mechanisms of Hacker News cannot suppress the mass hatred of something. When we see, on HN, a pattern of seething negativity against something leaking through the fine moderation system, maybe that something has some property which induces negativity. Be it completely unfair, or be it rationally justified, there it is. There is a way not to be confronted with anything negative, while staying online: join one of those social networks whose job is to feed you ads, surrounded only by content that you like, based on your liking history.
• EdSharkey 10y ago
  I think a bug tracker is where the rubber meets the road. Blog posts people write or hecklers on forums are potential avenues to take feedback, but a bug tracker is where you can expect the most actionable feedback. Since that's the maintainers' domain, I don't see why they shouldn't just close issues as "will-not-fix" with tags like RUDE or SUBMISSION_GUIDELINES. If someone is taking the time to file a bug report, and they genuinely want to see their problem get better, they'll follow the bug submission guidelines and give you a detailed report. Heck, if they really want to see change, maybe they'll even file a pull request with a patch. If someone just wants to flame or be snarky, close their bug and hopefully they'll try again with a more business-like, respectful post. Never forget, they are coming to you, and the customer isn't always right even if they are paying you. It's okay to blow people off who are just in the game to tear you a new one; life's too short to give them the satisfaction of your care and your craft. Trust me, the harshest thing you can do to someone like that is to ignore them completely as they've just wasted their time and energy flaming you. You can take some satisfaction in that.
• erikpukinskis 10y ago
  This reminds me of a powerful skill we could probably use a bit more of in this day and age: Recognize when you're just the flashpoint for someone's anger, not the cause of it, and don't take it personally. Abuse shouldn't be tolerated of course. But sometimes you're just the straw that broke the camel's back. And in those moments, if you can let yourself off the hook, and realize that there is a bigger issue going on, you can often redirect the conversation toward that bigger issue. Maybe if OP spent less time defending himself, less time taking the complaints personally, and more time just commiserating with people about the changes in the JavaScript community and how we should deal with them... maybe those interactions would've gone better and he'd be less burnt out. I realize this is victim blaming, from the perspective of someone who was just bullied. So, please don't take this as a critique of OP. It's just a path I am trying to keep in mind.
• adrianlmm 10y ago
  The "Angular 2 is Terrible" article was not a clik-bait and it wasn't exagerating, Angular 2 is indeed, terrible.
• bryanrasmussen 10y ago
  I thought the purpose of the Angular 2 is awful article was not to get the Angular 2 people to improve it but to make an argument for why people should not use it. Just as in art you can say that there are technologies that you believe are not to your taste and ones that you believe are bad (and there can also be technologies that aside from these categories are also morally bad - AMP). Angular seems to me to be one of those technologies people often think are bad. In the interest of avoiding pointless argumentation (god I'm getting old!) I guess I won't put my opinion here.
• halis 10y ago
  This isn't unique to open source software development. Anytime you're a public figure or a public company or otherwise working in some highly visible capacity, there are going to be haters in the building. It doesn't matter what you do, you could say that you're against the strangulation and drowning of kittens and there would be someone(s) out there shouting to the sky that you should be shot in the head for saying so. Fuck em! Ignore it. Move on.
• wattt 10y ago
  Rather than acknowledge some of the criticisms are true the author complains that complainers are the problem. Can't see the forest through the trees.
• tomkadwill 10y ago
  Great post. Open source maintainers clearly have some responsibility but we need to remember that they contribute their free time to make users lives easier
• mschuster91 10y ago
  The problem with the JS learning curve is the HUGE amount of StackOverflow and blog posts that are insanely outdated, with no way for the casual reader to check if the question or the answers are actually usable on a modern version. I believe that this, combined with complex, incomplete or outright missing documentation (hello Webpack, though the situation has improved since a couple of months) is something that holds the JS community back very hard - also because people complain all the time to framework authors "the example I c&p d from stackoverflow doesn't work" and answering these complaints takes nerve and time. The PHP community suffers from the same fate, btw - remember mysql_*? People still find it in the top 10 Google results for some questions. The only environments that have managed to resist this problem are Win32 and the userspace part of the Linux Kernel. In a lot of cases one is able to even open a VC6 project in a modern Visual Studio, have it converted and building - or at least just having to mess with the VC build process, but thanks to a hell of #ifdef's, the Win32 code still builds - and runs! For what it's worth, I can run Windows 95-era EarthSiege 2 on a 64-bit processor and the only things broken are the joystick input (by disassembly I believe the responsible code suffers from a bad version check on a struct) and some timer that binds a specific movement to the framerate and naturally overspeeds as a modern system can easily hit 100 FPS. Same holds true for the Linux kernel, it's amazing that a statically compiled game like UT2004 still runs on a modern day Linux system. In contrast, JavaScript - "npm install <whatever>", as many tutorials describe, is likely to already give an incompatible (with the instructions) package when the book finally gets printed. I have the feeling that like with libraries, major versions should always be backwards-compatible for their subversions, and have different NAMES for their major versions, e.g. "npm install angularjs1" vs "npm install angularjs2".
• nxrabl 10y ago
  What is going on in this thread? "Just don't come here" "Just turn off your notifications" "But Angular 2/Babel 6/Literally all of Javascript really does suck" "Developers can't take criticism" "Open source communities are bubbles" "Every community is like this" "All people are like this" "Sorry, but..." Didn't our mommas teach us that when you apologize, you actually apologize? Even if you and I personally didn't do anything like this, this man here says there's a problem. Let's work on the problem. When you use an open source project, you pay for it with your contributions to the project, whether those are code commits, bug reports, or just general feedback - and maybe that feedback doesn't need to be sunshine and roses all the time, but it should at least be concrete. Venting feels good, but it doesn't help anyone, not even yourself [0][1]. The least we can do is to stop normalizing knee-jerk, entitled, ad-hominem anger in our public fora. Because that's what this article is asking for. No one is saying we need to go out and fix all of human nature for a weekend project. We just have to stop upvoting rudeness. Is that so controversial? [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23249241 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23249241 [1] http://psp.sagepub.com/content/28/6/724.abstract http://psp.sagepub.com/content/28/6/724.abstract
  • forgottenpass 10y ago
    Let's work on the problem. Coo. But there's one of me, and 7 billion people that have - at least once - been more of an asshole than warranted. It's possible to simultaneously promote the change you want to see in the world, and promote coping strategies for the transitional period. The idea that we shouldn't need to deal with the status quo, but expect the world to conform to our whims instantly is unreasonable.
• edblarney 10y ago
  Chin Up.
• andrewstuart 10y ago
  I wrote the mentioned “[Babel 6 is] a lesson in how not to design software”. Maybe I shouldn't have written it at all. It's never my intent to hurt or insult anyone. Not by way of excuse, but by way of explanation all I can say is that Babel 6 is at the heart of JavaScript, and my experience of using it was days of crushing, mind bending pain because I had to configure everything - the point of the blog paost being that conventional wisdom is to make a set of rational configuration choices for your user, whilst Babel goes the OPPOSITE way - it does NOTHING by default. Perhaps if a person is unhappy with the outcome of using some open source software then the best thing to do is just turn away and silently stop using it. Hard to do though when that software has become central to the ecosystem. I hope I was criticising the software design decisions and not the authors.