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I get a fair amount of ridicule any time anything I write makes it into sites like reddit, and a small amount (depending on topic) when it makes it onto HN. Wh

I get a fair amount of ridicule any time anything I write makes it into sites like reddit, and a small amount (depending on topic) when it makes it onto HN. When one of my posts hit the front page yesterday, I decided to re-read "How to Disagree": http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html Having done that, I can now just privately laugh at anyone who fails to come up with an adequate refutation of my central point. People who just say things like "this is crap" can be prodded like "okay, maybe it is, but you didn't say how", and then when they fail to come up with how, you know where they are functioning. It looks like she did exactly this (asked them to explain it) on Twitter, and got the same sort of "it just sucks" reply. Eventually, you can get to a point where they can be safely ignored or even used for your own personal entertainment. One sent to me on HN: "What an asshole. Chromium's code is there for review, you know." I said in reply: "Thanks! Comments like this mean I'm on the right track." Yeah, it's stupid that you have to suffer before you can get to this point, but it's not like we're talking about an industry which defaults to caring for others. ... Regarding the actual program, I don't write shell utilities in JavaScript so I can't say whether it's a good or a bad implementation. It's just not my space. It's not something I seem to need (since I tend to abuse perl to do such work), so I can't comment on the overall utility, either.

jmillikin 14y ago
> Regarding the actual program, I don't write shell > utilities in JavaScript so I can't say whether it's a > good or a bad implementation. It's just not my space. According to some other posts here, the quoted mockers are Ruby programmers. I believe the Twitter posts are about the concept of writing sed in Node-Javascript, not necessarily the implementation. As I understand it there's something of a rivalry between the Ruby and Node communities, and the Ruby community is known to be tolerant of boorish behavior.
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Hum. It reminds me of performance art, to be honest.
  - ddunkin 14y ago
    It does, any art really. If the software were the brushes, no piece of software is right for every artist. Should we trash people for making 'yet another social network' or 'yet another online map database'? This is even a smaller scale project and barely worth the effort to complain about. Programming can be a much more creative exercise, and sometimes people forget that. I don't always do things to be useful, I do them to be fun and educational.
- nikatwork 14y ago
  So there is some truth to the stereotype of the angry asshole Rubyist? I thought the community had moved on since those days. I've been tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Clojure next, and this kind of crap is a real turn-off for Ruby.
  - madhadron 14y ago
    Do Clojure. Ruby suffers from a number of serious basic errors in its design. I'm in the middle of the long task of writing a clear, substantive criticism of them, but why they were bad choices is quite subtle, though it has large implications. That and Ruby has a culture of little or no documentation, even of the standard library, no attempt at consistency in APIs, even for something as basic as different kinds of network socket, and a community with rather more noise and rather less experience than makes me comfortable.
  - mylittlepony 14y ago
    Having tried Ruby for a year, I have experimented this myself. With a strong OOP background, I can assert that it's not even an elite that enjoys ridiculing noobs. It reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0 Also, just look at the top comment in that video. The irony.
  - 0xDECAFFEE 14y ago
    Ruby is an awesome language. The community, particularly the community that revolves around rails, and the "uncle craftsmanship" baloney, leaves many wondering WTF. I can't stress enough how nice it is to use the ruby language to code and solve problems.
  - eropple 14y ago
    I'm not a regular user of either, but I've much more enjoyed my time playing with Clojure and lurking in the community. For the most part they seem like solid people.
  - petercooper 14y ago
    As much as the "truth" of the stereotype of the jock PHP developer or smelly, fat, bearded C developer. That is to say, those people surely exist within each world but it's a shame when others lack the peripheral vision to see the true, bigger picture without falling into stereotyping.
- grannyg00se 14y ago
  Oh is that what it is? The tweets weren't specific enough. Basically a point and laugh response but I didn't get it. I looked at the code briefly and it certainly seemed odd that node/javascript was being used as a command line tool to do something that can already be done with other tools, but this person created this to make their life easier. Created. Had a problem and wrote working code to solve their problem. Then shared it. Not really something to point at in mockery.
krichman 14y ago
It's disappointing that someone like you who is trying to share information and learn together would be attacked like that. People are awful. I have a new policy of not responding to any comment that includes any form of ad hominem argumentation or any continued argument that is full of logical fallacies. It's just not worth the time to be arguing with people on Reddit or HN.
spin 14y ago
I have to agree. You need to look at the quality of the people who like you vs hate you. There's plenty of haters on the Internet. As jrockway said (just a couple comments up): "If you do something, chances are someone hates you. Why? They are jealous that you are getting attention instead of them." I heard a metaphor once: You've got a bucket full of crabs. If one crab tries to crawl up and out of the bucket, the other crabs drag him back down. Try your best to ignore the haters.
kragen 14y ago
I looked at the actual code and, although I'm no expert with Node, it looks pretty reasonable. The only things I can find to criticize was the word "replacize", which makes me cringe much like "performancing" or "optimizely", and the use of == instead of ===. But I think reasonable people could disagree about those things. Someone who isn't me might think "replacize" is sufficiently humorous to retain, for example. The nesting goes a little deeper than I would like: https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L90 https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L9... is 7 indents deep, for example, where I think something like 4 indents is a place where I should stop and start questioning what I'm doing. But three of those indents are a tradeoff forced by the node.js async API: anything that has to wait on the result of an asynchronous operation must necessarily be in another function, and you can choose whether to nest that function deeper or to move it somewhere unrelated and give it a name; and you have to use error codes instead of exceptions for error handling from those operations. The program actually includes a synchronous version of the same code, where the line corresponding to line 90 above is https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L126 https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L1..., the blank line following "var text = fs.readFileSync(file, "utf-8");". If that fails, it throws an exception, so the "if" block isn't needed, and the code that follows doesn't need to be nested. This is the agony and the ecstasy of Node: everything is (normally) asynchronous, giving you unwanted levels of nesting, but on the other hand, everything is asynchronous, so you can process the files in the order that the filesystem finds it most convenient to return them to you in. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Heather's code was typically much, much faster than find | xargs -P sed, simply because it was able to productively manage many more outstanding I/O requests at once. Line 90 also points to a pitfall that often befalls us with parallelism: at some point parallelism stops being productive, so you have to limit it. In this case, Heather's code throws the ball back to the user and suggests that they rerun their command in synchronous mode — albeit having partially completed the replacement task, which might be a bad failure mode, depending on whether your replacement is idempotent.

jmillikin 14y ago

> Regarding the actual program, I don't write shell > utilities in JavaScript so I can't say whether it's a > good or a bad implementation. It's just not my space. According to some other posts here, the quoted mockers are Ruby programmers. I believe the Twitter posts are about the concept of writing sed in Node-Javascript, not necessarily the implementation. As I understand it there's something of a rivalry between the Ruby and Node communities, and the Ruby community is known to be tolerant of boorish behavior.

rachelbythebay 14y ago
Hum. It reminds me of performance art, to be honest.
- ddunkin 14y ago
  It does, any art really. If the software were the brushes, no piece of software is right for every artist. Should we trash people for making 'yet another social network' or 'yet another online map database'? This is even a smaller scale project and barely worth the effort to complain about. Programming can be a much more creative exercise, and sometimes people forget that. I don't always do things to be useful, I do them to be fun and educational.
nikatwork 14y ago
So there is some truth to the stereotype of the angry asshole Rubyist? I thought the community had moved on since those days. I've been tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Clojure next, and this kind of crap is a real turn-off for Ruby.
- madhadron 14y ago
  Do Clojure. Ruby suffers from a number of serious basic errors in its design. I'm in the middle of the long task of writing a clear, substantive criticism of them, but why they were bad choices is quite subtle, though it has large implications. That and Ruby has a culture of little or no documentation, even of the standard library, no attempt at consistency in APIs, even for something as basic as different kinds of network socket, and a community with rather more noise and rather less experience than makes me comfortable.
- mylittlepony 14y ago
  Having tried Ruby for a year, I have experimented this myself. With a strong OOP background, I can assert that it's not even an elite that enjoys ridiculing noobs. It reminded me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX3iRjKj7C0 Also, just look at the top comment in that video. The irony.
- 0xDECAFFEE 14y ago
  Ruby is an awesome language. The community, particularly the community that revolves around rails, and the "uncle craftsmanship" baloney, leaves many wondering WTF. I can't stress enough how nice it is to use the ruby language to code and solve problems.
- eropple 14y ago
  I'm not a regular user of either, but I've much more enjoyed my time playing with Clojure and lurking in the community. For the most part they seem like solid people.
- petercooper 14y ago
  As much as the "truth" of the stereotype of the jock PHP developer or smelly, fat, bearded C developer. That is to say, those people surely exist within each world but it's a shame when others lack the peripheral vision to see the true, bigger picture without falling into stereotyping.
grannyg00se 14y ago
Oh is that what it is? The tweets weren't specific enough. Basically a point and laugh response but I didn't get it. I looked at the code briefly and it certainly seemed odd that node/javascript was being used as a command line tool to do something that can already be done with other tools, but this person created this to make their life easier. Created. Had a problem and wrote working code to solve their problem. Then shared it. Not really something to point at in mockery.

krichman 14y ago

It's disappointing that someone like you who is trying to share information and learn together would be attacked like that. People are awful. I have a new policy of not responding to any comment that includes any form of ad hominem argumentation or any continued argument that is full of logical fallacies. It's just not worth the time to be arguing with people on Reddit or HN.

spin 14y ago

I have to agree. You need to look at the quality of the people who like you vs hate you. There's plenty of haters on the Internet. As jrockway said (just a couple comments up): "If you do something, chances are someone hates you. Why? They are jealous that you are getting attention instead of them." I heard a metaphor once: You've got a bucket full of crabs. If one crab tries to crawl up and out of the bucket, the other crabs drag him back down. Try your best to ignore the haters.

kragen 14y ago

I looked at the actual code and, although I'm no expert with Node, it looks pretty reasonable. The only things I can find to criticize was the word "replacize", which makes me cringe much like "performancing" or "optimizely", and the use of == instead of ===. But I think reasonable people could disagree about those things. Someone who isn't me might think "replacize" is sufficiently humorous to retain, for example. The nesting goes a little deeper than I would like: https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L90 https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L9... is 7 indents deep, for example, where I think something like 4 indents is a place where I should stop and start questioning what I'm doing. But three of those indents are a tradeoff forced by the node.js async API: anything that has to wait on the result of an asynchronous operation must necessarily be in another function, and you can choose whether to nest that function deeper or to move it somewhere unrelated and give it a name; and you have to use error codes instead of exceptions for error handling from those operations. The program actually includes a synchronous version of the same code, where the line corresponding to line 90 above is https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L126 https://github.com/harthur/replace/blob/master/replace.js#L1..., the blank line following "var text = fs.readFileSync(file, "utf-8");". If that fails, it throws an exception, so the "if" block isn't needed, and the code that follows doesn't need to be nested. This is the agony and the ecstasy of Node: everything is (normally) asynchronous, giving you unwanted levels of nesting, but on the other hand, everything is asynchronous, so you can process the files in the order that the filesystem finds it most convenient to return them to you in. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out that Heather's code was typically much, much faster than find | xargs -P sed, simply because it was able to productively manage many more outstanding I/O requests at once. Line 90 also points to a pitfall that often befalls us with parallelism: at some point parallelism stops being productive, so you have to limit it. In this case, Heather's code throws the ball back to the user and suggests that they rerun their command in synchronous mode — albeit having partially completed the replacement task, which might be a bad failure mode, depending on whether your replacement is idempotent.