8 ms·

It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most pa

by dbaupp 9y ago

It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. I imagine that this, for the most part, isn't even opportunity cost: the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (or the Guile effort) anyway. And this sort of effort seems like it could be an on-boarding experience to improving the original code base, e.g. in the process of porting, someone notices a bug and so submits a patch upstream, or maybe the repeated exposure to a variety of the internal components gives someone enough familiarity with them to contribute if this project peters out.

nerdponx 9y ago
It wasn't a complaint, it was an honest observation.
- hammerandtongs 9y ago
  Irrelevant. Honesty doesn't keep it from being useless stop energy.
- Aileen343 9y ago
  Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt
mschaef 9y ago
I intended it more as a friendly suggestion or observation than anything else. Looking at the Github README, I see a lot of enthusiasm for Emacs and Rust, but not much justification for the (tremendous) effort of a port. Losing site of the value produced in the end result seems like the kind of 'software engineer mistake' I've made myself (many times) in the past. In any event, I think we would do volunteers a disservice if we placed them in a special class to which we could only provide positive feedback. (Maliciousness is never appropriate, of course.)
- pera 9y ago
  As an Emacs user one could see zero gain in this effort. But new languages like Rust do benefit (I believe) from this kind of projects: new libraries may be create for this port that could be useful for completely new applications. Also, it's more users/testers for Rust, which is always a good thing for their community.
  - omegaham 9y ago
    Another thing is that having large-scale successful projects make Rust a more likely language for other people to choose when creating a new project themsleves. "It's a neat language, but no one has used it to make anything that isn't a toy" is a really common mindset for the people who make such decisions. The only way to change that mindset is for the evangelists to write software and show that yes, it is possible to write For Realsies software in that language. If that happens to be a rewrite of a successful project, fine - it's still a large project, and it'll inspire more development than someone coming out of nowhere with a project.
    - rkangel 9y ago
      Rust has always had an advantage in this respect as it was being used to write servo. "Good enough for Mozilla to write a browser rendering engine" (I believe) helped a lot of people take it seriously early on and helped build the community.
- dbaupp 9y ago
  Both are good points, but I think it's always good to remember the humans behind work, even if you don't think it's useful work. It's perfectly reasonable to be unconvinced of the value of a project, but that doesn't mean one needs to be entirely "stop energy" (to take a nice phrasing from a now dead comment). Fortunately, your top level comment was taken in good faith by one of the contributors, but this won't always happen (and, especially in a space like editors, where everyone uses them and many people have unreasonably strong opinions, so people doing "unconventional" things may have a history of feeling attacked for their hobby) but not phrasing a comment as uncompromising criticism can encourage productive discussion (instead of randoms like me bringing up non-technical things like this whole subthread).
achikin 9y ago
>the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs >in the process of porting, someone notices a bug and so submits a patch upstream I find it a little bit controversial.
- coldtea 9y ago
  You probably meant conflicting. But it's not: one might very plausibly not care to hack on C emacs, but care to hack on a Rust emacs. And at the same time, the same person, might be able to spot a bug while porting C code to the Rust emacs, that will also help fix C-emacs.
- dbaupp 9y ago
  These aren't in opposition: it's what I meant by "on-boarding". If remacs didn't exist the hypothetical developer wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (it never crossed their mind, or it's too intimidating, or whatever other reason), but through their work on remacs, they've also contributed to the original emacs. The point is that the latter contribution would never have happened without remacs.
achikin 9y ago
This is one of the main issues of open source - people tend to work on what seems fun/interesting/rewarding. As a result a lot of people work on different implementations of the same things instead of coming up with one good solution and creating new things on top of it. Moreover, while some people work on the endless clones of the same thing, the completely different set of contributors is wasting their time cleaning up / fixing bugs / writing documentation for those endless clones. Examples are: a lot of Linux distros, which are almost the same but not one of them comes even close to MacOSX as a desktop OS. Javascript frameworks which solve the same rendering problem again and again. On the other side, there is Spacemacs, which tries to provide solid modern IDE-like experience on top of existing Emacs solution, leaving low-level stuff to emacs core team.
- pera 9y ago
  This is not something intrinsic in the nature of open source, but in how humans like to spend their free time. Of course we could all be much more efficient if we all had the same goals, but that's not how things work in a free society.
  - achikin 9y ago
    As a society we win big by collaboration in the first place. Not by diversity, disagreeing with other people and doing everything "your way". Imagine 1000 independent people trying to build Boeing in an opensource way.
    - always_good 9y ago
      What a bizarre argument. 1,000+ independent people trying their hand in the business world is ultimately how a Boeing is conceived. That is the extreme diversity that benefits society.
      - achikin 9y ago
        I didn't quite get it. Do you mean that Boeing is built by independent people who work on whatever they want to and then a plane is assembled of that independently built parts and no one takes the responsibility of the result? Or you mean that Boeing is subcontracting particular work to independent firms serving as architect, coordinator, and sponsor and taking all the responsibility?
coldtea 9y ago
>It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. It is, a little, but then again it's par for the course for Open Source projects, which are both volunteer AND seeking to engage a larger community. It's not like its just some people doing what they like and keeping it to themselves or just offering it as-is. Open Source projects that want to become larger communities and attract more developers AND end users, have to accept external opinion and criticism.
- dbaupp 9y ago
  There's many different sorts of open source projects, I've been involved with projects that - are mainly driven by paid contributors, with some volunteers - some number of paid contributors with many volunteers - have only volunteers And they are open source: - in order to engage a larger community of end users - in order to engage a larger community of developers (doing things with people is often more fun, and/or having more people poking at keyboards allows more, say, of an experiment to be accomplished) - to serve as a portfolio, e.g., for job seeking - as a political position (some variation of "code should be open") - out of habit/because there's no reason to not be open source (Or some combination of the above.) As far as I know, remacs is driven entirely by volunteers, but I don't know where it fits into the latter category. The original author has written blog post(s) about it, so clearly they want people to know about it, but it isn't obvious to me if they care particularly about people using the result for editing text rather than, say, investigating and showing off the solutions to problems encountered along the way (portfolio) or being able to collaborate on a fun project with people (community of developers). In any case, I agree with you about projects accepting criticism, but I think the style of criticism needs to take into account the specifics of the project: something like, there should be less "this is a waste of effort"/"I think you should do something else" and more of the pure technical stuff ("algorithm ABC might be more efficient than the XYZ currently used, as ABC is O(n log n)", or something) as one moves further down either list.
wott 9y ago
I see no problem in anyone willing to toy with whatever he likes. I have a problem when huge efforts are invested by huge teams on huge projects which clearly have no purpose. I mean, if you have a lot of energy to use and give, and you want to clone something huge, clone one the proprietary tools that have no free/open source equivalent yet in your domain or one of the domains where there are the most serious lacks of FOSS; or clone a web app into a real desktop program; or reverse engineer a proper open driver for whatever device you have which request a proprietary OS, a proprietary driver or a manufacturer specific tool; rewrite a library which only exists in Python or C# into a C or C-compatible library so that every language on Earth can wrap it, etc. Don't go cloning something that is already free multiplatform software just for the purpose of cloning. We have never had so many people writing open-source programs, taking part in open-source projects, and yet it looks like the progress of open-source over proprietary (and its new form: services) is not what it was in the 90's and 2000's, it stalled, and it regresses in some areas. There has to be a problem somewhere.
- wtetzner 9y ago
  > I have a problem when huge efforts are invested by huge teams on huge projects which clearly have no purpose. This strikes me as a very entitled viewpoint. Why should people work on what you want them to work on? They could be watching TV or playing video games in their free time, but if they work on a project you don't think is valuable, it's somehow a problem?

by dbaupp 9y ago

nerdponx 9y ago

It wasn't a complaint, it was an honest observation.

hammerandtongs 9y ago
Irrelevant. Honesty doesn't keep it from being useless stop energy.
Aileen343 9y ago
Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... https://is.gd/qKRnJt https://is.gd/qKRnJt

mschaef 9y ago

I intended it more as a friendly suggestion or observation than anything else. Looking at the Github README, I see a lot of enthusiasm for Emacs and Rust, but not much justification for the (tremendous) effort of a port. Losing site of the value produced in the end result seems like the kind of 'software engineer mistake' I've made myself (many times) in the past. In any event, I think we would do volunteers a disservice if we placed them in a special class to which we could only provide positive feedback. (Maliciousness is never appropriate, of course.)

pera 9y ago
As an Emacs user one could see zero gain in this effort. But new languages like Rust do benefit (I believe) from this kind of projects: new libraries may be create for this port that could be useful for completely new applications. Also, it's more users/testers for Rust, which is always a good thing for their community.
- omegaham 9y ago
  Another thing is that having large-scale successful projects make Rust a more likely language for other people to choose when creating a new project themsleves. "It's a neat language, but no one has used it to make anything that isn't a toy" is a really common mindset for the people who make such decisions. The only way to change that mindset is for the evangelists to write software and show that yes, it is possible to write For Realsies software in that language. If that happens to be a rewrite of a successful project, fine - it's still a large project, and it'll inspire more development than someone coming out of nowhere with a project.
  - rkangel 9y ago
    Rust has always had an advantage in this respect as it was being used to write servo. "Good enough for Mozilla to write a browser rendering engine" (I believe) helped a lot of people take it seriously early on and helped build the community.
dbaupp 9y ago
Both are good points, but I think it's always good to remember the humans behind work, even if you don't think it's useful work. It's perfectly reasonable to be unconvinced of the value of a project, but that doesn't mean one needs to be entirely "stop energy" (to take a nice phrasing from a now dead comment). Fortunately, your top level comment was taken in good faith by one of the contributors, but this won't always happen (and, especially in a space like editors, where everyone uses them and many people have unreasonably strong opinions, so people doing "unconventional" things may have a history of feeling attacked for their hobby) but not phrasing a comment as uncompromising criticism can encourage productive discussion (instead of randoms like me bringing up non-technical things like this whole subthread).

achikin 9y ago

>the people working on it probably wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs >in the process of porting, someone notices a bug and so submits a patch upstream I find it a little bit controversial.

coldtea 9y ago
You probably meant conflicting. But it's not: one might very plausibly not care to hack on C emacs, but care to hack on a Rust emacs. And at the same time, the same person, might be able to spot a bug while porting C code to the Rust emacs, that will also help fix C-emacs.
dbaupp 9y ago
These aren't in opposition: it's what I meant by "on-boarding". If remacs didn't exist the hypothetical developer wouldn't be contributing to full Emacs (it never crossed their mind, or it's too intimidating, or whatever other reason), but through their work on remacs, they've also contributed to the original emacs. The point is that the latter contribution would never have happened without remacs.

achikin 9y ago

This is one of the main issues of open source - people tend to work on what seems fun/interesting/rewarding. As a result a lot of people work on different implementations of the same things instead of coming up with one good solution and creating new things on top of it. Moreover, while some people work on the endless clones of the same thing, the completely different set of contributors is wasting their time cleaning up / fixing bugs / writing documentation for those endless clones. Examples are: a lot of Linux distros, which are almost the same but not one of them comes even close to MacOSX as a desktop OS. Javascript frameworks which solve the same rendering problem again and again. On the other side, there is Spacemacs, which tries to provide solid modern IDE-like experience on top of existing Emacs solution, leaving low-level stuff to emacs core team.

pera 9y ago
This is not something intrinsic in the nature of open source, but in how humans like to spend their free time. Of course we could all be much more efficient if we all had the same goals, but that's not how things work in a free society.
- achikin 9y ago
  As a society we win big by collaboration in the first place. Not by diversity, disagreeing with other people and doing everything "your way". Imagine 1000 independent people trying to build Boeing in an opensource way.
  - always_good 9y ago
    What a bizarre argument. 1,000+ independent people trying their hand in the business world is ultimately how a Boeing is conceived. That is the extreme diversity that benefits society.
    - achikin 9y ago
      I didn't quite get it. Do you mean that Boeing is built by independent people who work on whatever they want to and then a plane is assembled of that independently built parts and no one takes the responsibility of the result? Or you mean that Boeing is subcontracting particular work to independent firms serving as architect, coordinator, and sponsor and taking all the responsibility?

coldtea 9y ago

>It seems a bit rude to complain about volunteers for doing something they want to do rather than what you want them to do. It is, a little, but then again it's par for the course for Open Source projects, which are both volunteer AND seeking to engage a larger community. It's not like its just some people doing what they like and keeping it to themselves or just offering it as-is. Open Source projects that want to become larger communities and attract more developers AND end users, have to accept external opinion and criticism.

dbaupp 9y ago
There's many different sorts of open source projects, I've been involved with projects that - are mainly driven by paid contributors, with some volunteers - some number of paid contributors with many volunteers - have only volunteers And they are open source: - in order to engage a larger community of end users - in order to engage a larger community of developers (doing things with people is often more fun, and/or having more people poking at keyboards allows more, say, of an experiment to be accomplished) - to serve as a portfolio, e.g., for job seeking - as a political position (some variation of "code should be open") - out of habit/because there's no reason to not be open source (Or some combination of the above.) As far as I know, remacs is driven entirely by volunteers, but I don't know where it fits into the latter category. The original author has written blog post(s) about it, so clearly they want people to know about it, but it isn't obvious to me if they care particularly about people using the result for editing text rather than, say, investigating and showing off the solutions to problems encountered along the way (portfolio) or being able to collaborate on a fun project with people (community of developers). In any case, I agree with you about projects accepting criticism, but I think the style of criticism needs to take into account the specifics of the project: something like, there should be less "this is a waste of effort"/"I think you should do something else" and more of the pure technical stuff ("algorithm ABC might be more efficient than the XYZ currently used, as ABC is O(n log n)", or something) as one moves further down either list.

wott 9y ago

I see no problem in anyone willing to toy with whatever he likes. I have a problem when huge efforts are invested by huge teams on huge projects which clearly have no purpose. I mean, if you have a lot of energy to use and give, and you want to clone something huge, clone one the proprietary tools that have no free/open source equivalent yet in your domain or one of the domains where there are the most serious lacks of FOSS; or clone a web app into a real desktop program; or reverse engineer a proper open driver for whatever device you have which request a proprietary OS, a proprietary driver or a manufacturer specific tool; rewrite a library which only exists in Python or C# into a C or C-compatible library so that every language on Earth can wrap it, etc. Don't go cloning something that is already free multiplatform software just for the purpose of cloning. We have never had so many people writing open-source programs, taking part in open-source projects, and yet it looks like the progress of open-source over proprietary (and its new form: services) is not what it was in the 90's and 2000's, it stalled, and it regresses in some areas. There has to be a problem somewhere.

wtetzner 9y ago
> I have a problem when huge efforts are invested by huge teams on huge projects which clearly have no purpose. This strikes me as a very entitled viewpoint. Why should people work on what you want them to work on? They could be watching TV or playing video games in their free time, but if they work on a project you don't think is valuable, it's somehow a problem?