4 ms·
Something is wrong when we expect high quality libraries for free. The authors are highly skilled individuals with mortgages to pay and children to feed. Not su
by bookofsand 5y ago
Something is wrong when we expect high quality libraries for free. The authors are highly skilled individuals with mortgages to pay and children to feed. Not sure what the answer is. If coupling Observable with d3 is such an answer, then more power to them. Related, I've stumbled upon this blurb from Codemirror6. Perhaps another answer.
If you are using CodeMirror commercially, there is a social expectation that you help fund its maintenance.
https://codemirror.net/6 https://codemirror.net/6
- th0ma5 5y agoThere are countless high quality libraries available for free.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoThere really aren’t. As soon as you need something t specific, which is literally all the time in software development, you generally have less than 5 useful implementations, and that’s being generous.
- tobr 5y agoIf you break up countless libraries in very small and specific categories, you can start to count them, yes.
- mirekrusin 5y agod3 for example.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoBait and switch is not acceptable. If they want to make money from D3, they should charge for D3. What they're doing is disingenuous and has strong similarities to the drug trade. I don't expect people to work for me for free but I do expect people to not tell me they're going to do something for me for free and then try to find a way to charge me for it later. If they want to make a living from D3, they should be upfront about it and charge accordingly.
- lamontcg 5y ago> has strong similarities to the drug trade. well that's a bit over the top.
- webmaven 5y ago> > has strong similarities to the drug trade. > well that's a bit over the top. “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software.” — Edward Tufte
- lamontcg 5y ago"Sadly many computer users become computer dealers in order to support their habit." -- someone's .signature on Usenet around 1992
- ampdepolymerase 5y agoCreating tutorials is not bait and switch. Any competent web dev can learn from the documentation instead. The Observable tutorials are no different from e.g. Heroku tutorials on Rails, or the usual web tech blog spam Logrocket churns out.
- thelastbender12 5y agoThis remark is really unkind. D3 precedes Observable, and the development path is exactly what someone would take if they wanted to make data visualization accessible - create a base library, and later opinionated tools to work with it. The harshest way to interpret unavailability of regular JS tutorials should be that the primary authors don't have enough bandwidth or the inclination to work on it, and the community hasn't picked up the slack to make it more accessible to beginners. The authors deserve nothing other than gratitude.
- hesarenu 5y agoMaybe they should not redirect users to observable when clicking on d3js examples.
- twelvechairs 5y ago> Something is wrong when we expect high quality libraries for free. Expecting free libraries is natural because the world is built on free libraries and free software. There's models to be paid within this of course (the largest by establishing expertise and then selling support). On the contrary, expecting everyone to pay for libraries is a model proven to have a much more limited lifespan (which also has implications on the developer's career).
- pjmlp 5y agoMy developer career has been great focusing mostly on software products that consumers care to pay for. In fact, if I learned something from free beer libraries is that it was a mistake to fall down that rabbit hole.