There are a few open source projects which I would be willing to ridicule. In general the projects have traction, a significant history, and horrible code whic

There are a few open source projects which I would be willing to ridicule. In general the projects have traction, a significant history, and horrible code which never gets more than marginally better over more than a decade. It is one thing to be starting out. It is something else to decline self-improvement. The problem though is this (and I have been on the receiving end of very harsh criticism of people I respected, some of which was shown correct over time), that there are often problems with critics jumping to conclusions and at the same time not being very detailed. Thus a response like these tweets can only be a "gut reaction" and never really very helpful to anyone. There is no time involved trying to grok the code. There is no opportunity to discuss what potential tradeoffs have been made or why. These two things need to be corrected. I don't think folks should criticize code without trying to work with it and understand the API's. I don't think folks should leave a critique like "that's the old 1990's way of doing things" or "that code sucks." It is much better to get something like "So I see a few problems with the code... and ...." In fact the few times I have gotten the latter (publishing code and getting responses like "I see some important concurrency issues there. This isn't safe to run on production.") I have been happy with the panning because I could fix the problems. But that's a far cry from what the article is referring to and it is, unfortunately a lot less common, IMO.