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As a prolific contributor to open source yourself, I’d have expected you to be a little more sympathetic to other open source developers giving up their time fr
by hnlmorg 2y ago
As a prolific contributor to open source yourself, I’d have expected you to be a little more sympathetic to other open source developers giving up their time freely.
For some contributors, they’ll have a day job, a family and other personal commitments. so writing open source code is a luxury they don’t have a lot of time for. I know this because I fall exactly into that camp myself.
- wiseowise 2y agoJust because they give up their time freely it makes their decisions immune to criticism?
- hnlmorg 2y agoConstructive feedback is fine. jarts comment wasn’t that.
- wiseowise 2y agoWe will never know if jarts comment was constructive or not until we know original developers decision process. If original decision process was indeed “less keystrokes”, then how is that not a constructive criticism?
- hnlmorg 2y agoThe developers motives doesn’t change the snarky way jart wrote their comment. And if you felt their comment was acceptable then I question how much you’ve contributed to open source yourself. Snarky comments like jarts are all too common and really demotivate people from maintaining popular projects. But don’t just take my word on it, there’s a plethora of other contributors who’ve talked about this topic as well.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoWhere's the snark though? jart's comment reads true literally. Compile times are a big deal, and 'jart is right about individual vs. collective problems. And unlike most other critics on the Internet, 'jart actually provided a solution along with the criticism. If that kind of behavior "demotivates [some] people from maintaining popular projects", I still feel it's a net win.
- wiseowise 2y agoWhat difference does it even make if it’s an open source project or not? Compile times are a big deal.
- hnlmorg 2y agoI’m not talking about compile times. I’m talking about the way people should communicate respectfully.
- jart 2y agoWell maybe you should be, since focusing on the technology is what allows our disagreements to be impersonal.
- hnlmorg 2y agoExactly. Which, unfortunately, isn’t how you framed your original comment. Instead you talked about the authors motives and indirectly called them lazy. If you focused your comment purely on the technology rather than making ad hominem attacks to the contributor then we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation to begin with.
- wiseowise 2y agoBelieve me, his message is as respectful as it gets. I have far, far, FAR stronger words for “people” who don’t respect other people’s time by not caring about compile times. Words that would make Linus blush.
- hnlmorg 2y agoThat’s more a statement on yourself though. You don’t need to comment that way, you choose to. So my point stands.
- gr4vityWall 2y agoI don't think a supposedly bad decision has to be answered with being snarky. A pull request, or a fork focused on reducing build times are actual net gains. From that poster's original name, seems like they went on and did just that, which is great I believe. At the very least, giving the original developer the benefit of doubt, or assuming their decision made sense under the circumstances they were in at the time, is IMO a better start than just public criticism.
- jart 2y agoI'm defending open source developers. We can't freely modify open source code if it has glacial build times. It's specifically because people are volunteering that we should aim to be as conscientious as possible when it comes to build latency. Someone who volunteers to contribute code that compiles slowly is not being respectful of the time of all the other volunteers, which is like pumping the brakes on the open source movement. So I will make my views clear that development practices need to improve.
- EasyMark 2y agoThose people can create their own projects then. If the library/foss project doesn’t make it because of popularity then natural selection of the code worked, if people choose to accept the latency then it succeeds because it’s utility is worth more than time saved during a compile.
- jart 2y agoThat's the same argument companies like Google make when they're in the exploit phase of their lifecycle. We can afford to let search results get worse, just so long as they're no so much worse people don't turn to our competitors. However they're doing it for money, so at least they have a good reason. Who can say why someone would make their software unpleasant with template metaprogramming.