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I'll watch all of Bryan's talks, he is just such an engaging and interesting speaker. Very good insights there, the idea that when you buy into a platform you

by rdtsc 9y ago

I'll watch all of Bryan's talks, he is just such an engaging and interesting speaker. Very good insights there, the idea that when you buy into a platform you buy into the values of its community. Interestingly enough it's why I didn't buy into the node.js's community. From interviewing people and talking to them at conferences and meetups somehow nodejs fans were both the most excited yet didn't really know what they talked about. Either one of those characteristics are ok, but both at the same time are hard to stomach. Then all the public scandals that seem to have node, also makes it hard to buy into - that pronoun scandal, io.js fork, another fork (ayo?), left-pad-gate.

inglor 9y ago
The happenings in the Node.js community such as forks are a positive and good thing. They let people experiment with things in a new environment. A lot of good came from io.js (modern V8, promise integration etc). Ayo are working on interesting stuff like shared-memory workers for CPU intensive stuff. The left-pad thing was indeed strange, but it could have equally happened with most package manager - and NPM improved for it. Newbies being excited about something is the hallmark of a popular platform. Node.js feels like this as it graduated from a "fun project" to a popular web platform. I think most stacks have competent and incompetent developers - making Node.js accessible is a good thing, even if it means there are more new people. At the Node.js project we're really fine with those and some "newbies" turned out to be pretty great programmers. full disclosure: I am a Node.js collaborator.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- reificator 9y ago
  The left pad thing could have happened somewhere else, true enough. But it was far more likely to happen in Node than anywhere else, for the following two reasons: 1.) Javascript has a tiny stdlib relative to other languages that are also used for "real work". I make that distinction just to rule out LOLCode/etc.... 2.) NPM makes it so damn easy to add dependencies, both for finished products as well as component packages themselves. #2 came about because of #1, and is honestly the only way that Node could have gained traction. So while it's NPM's fault you can't really blame them for making that choice. A month or two ago I wanted to add a single NPM dependency to a project at work. I knew it built on top of other packages, but when I installed it I ended up somewhere between 690 and 700 dependencies. From typing `npm install {one-specific-package}`.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    More crucially to your point 2, NPM allowed people to remove packages once they've been released, and for others to release packages with the identical name as a previously-existing package. I'm not aware of any other package managers that exhibit this rather dangerous behavior.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - reificator 9y ago
      Yeah, I did leave that bit out, because that's an implementation detail that I believe they have since resolved. It was a massive mistake, but one that could have been avoided and has since been patched. #1 and #2 are foundational to providing Javascript on the server. You could do without #2, but because of #1 it means you'll have a harder time attracting and maintaining a userbase if you don't do it that way. This leaves you vulnerable in the long run IMO.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        > but one that could have been avoided and has since been patched. It would be really nice if many newer languages didn't act like they existed in a vacuum and no prior art existed. Package management was by no means new at the point NPM was being developed, and if they didn't have enough people with experience with the nasty edge cases package managers in other languages had discovered, it would have been trivial to solicit advice from the architects of the package systems for other languages. If there's one thing software engineers love, it's talking about crazy situations where nobody considered this weird edge case and how they had to scramble to fix it (I know I do). I think we've thankfully gotten to a spot where there's enough users and developers of modern programming languages with experience in other languages that we're seeing good cross-pollination at the language design level (e.g. async/await is quickly being adopted by many languages as either a core feature or through a library that's popular). That just doesn't seem to have happened yet with the architecture around the languages yet.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
MrBuddyCasino 9y ago
I have been thinking about programming languages in terms of communities as well lately. Which one do you find most attractive?
- rdtsc 9y ago
  I like these communities: Python - it's a very large community. Given its size it's pretty diverse and also mature. It had some drama around an incident at Pycon a few years back and around the 2 -> 3 transition. Also Pycon is probably one of the most fun tech conferences. Erlang - it's an example of a great small community. A lot of knowledgeable people. It has been around for about the same time as C. A good mix of people who have been involved in the community for 30 years and newcomers. There is almost no drama, people might disagree but that's ok. Sometime someone said something that was taken offensively in the online discussion, and the person apologized and everyone moved on. No forks, no backstabbing, voting anyone out and so on. Elixir - probably my favorite example of wonderful community. And here all credit goes to Jose Valim and others on the team. They specifically focused on making the community warm, and welcoming for new people. That means not just codes of conduct but great documentations, good help and support online, tools to get started to write tests and so on. Also as a nice benefit they also in a way a part of the Erlang community as because there have been a lot of cool new fixes and features they've submitted for BEAM VM over the years. So depending on what you'd be interested in, I'd pick one of those. No doubt there are other great communities (I suspect Rust is one) I am just not as familiar with them so this is definitely not a exhaustive list or a ranking, just my personal experience.

by rdtsc 9y ago

inglor 9y ago

The happenings in the Node.js community such as forks are a positive and good thing. They let people experiment with things in a new environment. A lot of good came from io.js (modern V8, promise integration etc). Ayo are working on interesting stuff like shared-memory workers for CPU intensive stuff. The left-pad thing was indeed strange, but it could have equally happened with most package manager - and NPM improved for it. Newbies being excited about something is the hallmark of a popular platform. Node.js feels like this as it graduated from a "fun project" to a popular web platform. I think most stacks have competent and incompetent developers - making Node.js accessible is a good thing, even if it means there are more new people. At the Node.js project we're really fine with those and some "newbies" turned out to be pretty great programmers. full disclosure: I am a Node.js collaborator.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
reificator 9y ago
The left pad thing could have happened somewhere else, true enough. But it was far more likely to happen in Node than anywhere else, for the following two reasons: 1.) Javascript has a tiny stdlib relative to other languages that are also used for "real work". I make that distinction just to rule out LOLCode/etc.... 2.) NPM makes it so damn easy to add dependencies, both for finished products as well as component packages themselves. #2 came about because of #1, and is honestly the only way that Node could have gained traction. So while it's NPM's fault you can't really blame them for making that choice. A month or two ago I wanted to add a single NPM dependency to a project at work. I knew it built on top of other packages, but when I installed it I ended up somewhere between 690 and 700 dependencies. From typing `npm install {one-specific-package}`.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  More crucially to your point 2, NPM allowed people to remove packages once they've been released, and for others to release packages with the identical name as a previously-existing package. I'm not aware of any other package managers that exhibit this rather dangerous behavior.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - reificator 9y ago
    Yeah, I did leave that bit out, because that's an implementation detail that I believe they have since resolved. It was a massive mistake, but one that could have been avoided and has since been patched. #1 and #2 are foundational to providing Javascript on the server. You could do without #2, but because of #1 it means you'll have a harder time attracting and maintaining a userbase if you don't do it that way. This leaves you vulnerable in the long run IMO.
    - kbenson 9y ago
      > but one that could have been avoided and has since been patched. It would be really nice if many newer languages didn't act like they existed in a vacuum and no prior art existed. Package management was by no means new at the point NPM was being developed, and if they didn't have enough people with experience with the nasty edge cases package managers in other languages had discovered, it would have been trivial to solicit advice from the architects of the package systems for other languages. If there's one thing software engineers love, it's talking about crazy situations where nobody considered this weird edge case and how they had to scramble to fix it (I know I do). I think we've thankfully gotten to a spot where there's enough users and developers of modern programming languages with experience in other languages that we're seeing good cross-pollination at the language design level (e.g. async/await is quickly being adopted by many languages as either a core feature or through a library that's popular). That just doesn't seem to have happened yet with the architecture around the languages yet.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

MrBuddyCasino 9y ago

I have been thinking about programming languages in terms of communities as well lately. Which one do you find most attractive?

rdtsc 9y ago
I like these communities: Python - it's a very large community. Given its size it's pretty diverse and also mature. It had some drama around an incident at Pycon a few years back and around the 2 -> 3 transition. Also Pycon is probably one of the most fun tech conferences. Erlang - it's an example of a great small community. A lot of knowledgeable people. It has been around for about the same time as C. A good mix of people who have been involved in the community for 30 years and newcomers. There is almost no drama, people might disagree but that's ok. Sometime someone said something that was taken offensively in the online discussion, and the person apologized and everyone moved on. No forks, no backstabbing, voting anyone out and so on. Elixir - probably my favorite example of wonderful community. And here all credit goes to Jose Valim and others on the team. They specifically focused on making the community warm, and welcoming for new people. That means not just codes of conduct but great documentations, good help and support online, tools to get started to write tests and so on. Also as a nice benefit they also in a way a part of the Erlang community as because there have been a lot of cool new fixes and features they've submitted for BEAM VM over the years. So depending on what you'd be interested in, I'd pick one of those. No doubt there are other great communities (I suspect Rust is one) I am just not as familiar with them so this is definitely not a exhaustive list or a ranking, just my personal experience.