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You can't impress developers on HN. There's something about the social dynamics of large groups of developers online that causes relatively-uninteresting critic

You can't impress developers on HN. There's something about the social dynamics of large groups of developers online that causes relatively-uninteresting criticisms to dominate. But when somebody's actually trying something out, rather than just kibitzing? They're a lot friendlier. If you couldn't impress developers we'd never switch to new technologies. And yet here we are, with rack and sinatra and cucumber and node and clojure.

waterlesscloud 13y ago
That's my main problem with the tone that's coming to be more and more apparent- The criticisms just aren't interesting. It's disappointing to open a discussion thread and have the top couple of comments be some negative nitpick of something that's shallow or irrelevant. Next time you're about to post, ask yourself if it's the most interesting thing you could say about the topic. If it's not, why not think for a moment and then post what is most interesting?
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
I'm not sure that the "new technologies" you listed are very good examples. Rack, for instance, isn't really that much different from CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, NSAPI, ISAPI, Apache modules, and so forth. It's just one more way of invoking custom code to handle an HTTP request. This is something we've been doing for many years now, and it really isn't "new". The same goes for Sinatra. I remember seeing Perl and Tcl code in the 1990s that essentially did the same thing. It's pretty much the most basic and obvious way of handling such a situation. Cucumber reminds me of some internal software I dealt with at one firm back in the 1980s. Business analysts would write English-like acceptance tests, then feed them to a program that would generate PL/I code that'd automatically test different aspects of an accounting system. Clojure is perhaps the worst of the examples. It's merely a dialect of a programming language that's over 50 years old. Many of us first worked with Lisp decades ago. Even targeting the JVM doesn't make it special, given that the Java platform has been publicly available for almost 20 years, and was targeted by non-Java languages well before Clojure attempted it. While the implementations may be new, the ideas surely aren't. Having worked with equivalent technologies in the past, sometimes decades ago, many of us here just don't find them interesting or special in any way.
- thedanfilter 13y ago
  Congratulations to PommeDeTerre for providing the perfect example of the sort of comments that are so condescending. I hope that he/she meant it in jest.
  - PommeDeTerre 13y ago
    No, I'm completely serious. Can you explain how my last comment was "condescending"? It's not "condescending" to express an idea that differs from that of somebody else. It's not "condescending" to disagree with a claim made by somebody else. It's not "condescending" to give examples why a claim somebody else made may not be true. The commenter I replied to suggested that certain technologies were "new". I disagreed, and provided reasons why I don't consider them new, based on other technologies that I, and very likely others here, have used in the past. If you wish to discuss those technologies and their novelty, I'd welcome such discussion. If you disagree with my claims, that's fine. I'm just not certain how you accusing me of being "condescending", without even giving any evidence to back up this claim, is productive.
    - thedanfilter 13y ago
      To clarify, to me, each particular statement was condescending to the developers of those products. The comments are condescending because you imply that there is no difference between them and the technologies you listed. In reality, most advances are made incrementally, and if one wants to make such an advance then one often needs to reimplement some, or all, aspects of what has been done before. "What" a tool does is often irrelevant. Often advances occur in "How". And "How" is often either hard to communicate, not desirable to communicate (I.e. for competitive advantage), or not particularly interesting, but vitally important. Indeed, often existing technologies need to be trimmed back to provide a more useful subset - asm.js comes to mind. However, obviously the person you replied to was using those as _examples_. Your reply completely missed the point he was trying to make that new things, I.e. things that are not the same as other things, are used by people regardless of how similar they may be to other things.
    - deleted 13y ago

waterlesscloud 13y ago

That's my main problem with the tone that's coming to be more and more apparent- The criticisms just aren't interesting. It's disappointing to open a discussion thread and have the top couple of comments be some negative nitpick of something that's shallow or irrelevant. Next time you're about to post, ask yourself if it's the most interesting thing you could say about the topic. If it's not, why not think for a moment and then post what is most interesting?

PommeDeTerre 13y ago

I'm not sure that the "new technologies" you listed are very good examples. Rack, for instance, isn't really that much different from CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, NSAPI, ISAPI, Apache modules, and so forth. It's just one more way of invoking custom code to handle an HTTP request. This is something we've been doing for many years now, and it really isn't "new". The same goes for Sinatra. I remember seeing Perl and Tcl code in the 1990s that essentially did the same thing. It's pretty much the most basic and obvious way of handling such a situation. Cucumber reminds me of some internal software I dealt with at one firm back in the 1980s. Business analysts would write English-like acceptance tests, then feed them to a program that would generate PL/I code that'd automatically test different aspects of an accounting system. Clojure is perhaps the worst of the examples. It's merely a dialect of a programming language that's over 50 years old. Many of us first worked with Lisp decades ago. Even targeting the JVM doesn't make it special, given that the Java platform has been publicly available for almost 20 years, and was targeted by non-Java languages well before Clojure attempted it. While the implementations may be new, the ideas surely aren't. Having worked with equivalent technologies in the past, sometimes decades ago, many of us here just don't find them interesting or special in any way.

thedanfilter 13y ago
Congratulations to PommeDeTerre for providing the perfect example of the sort of comments that are so condescending. I hope that he/she meant it in jest.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  No, I'm completely serious. Can you explain how my last comment was "condescending"? It's not "condescending" to express an idea that differs from that of somebody else. It's not "condescending" to disagree with a claim made by somebody else. It's not "condescending" to give examples why a claim somebody else made may not be true. The commenter I replied to suggested that certain technologies were "new". I disagreed, and provided reasons why I don't consider them new, based on other technologies that I, and very likely others here, have used in the past. If you wish to discuss those technologies and their novelty, I'd welcome such discussion. If you disagree with my claims, that's fine. I'm just not certain how you accusing me of being "condescending", without even giving any evidence to back up this claim, is productive.
  - thedanfilter 13y ago
    To clarify, to me, each particular statement was condescending to the developers of those products. The comments are condescending because you imply that there is no difference between them and the technologies you listed. In reality, most advances are made incrementally, and if one wants to make such an advance then one often needs to reimplement some, or all, aspects of what has been done before. "What" a tool does is often irrelevant. Often advances occur in "How". And "How" is often either hard to communicate, not desirable to communicate (I.e. for competitive advantage), or not particularly interesting, but vitally important. Indeed, often existing technologies need to be trimmed back to provide a more useful subset - asm.js comes to mind. However, obviously the person you replied to was using those as _examples_. Your reply completely missed the point he was trying to make that new things, I.e. things that are not the same as other things, are used by people regardless of how similar they may be to other things.
  - deleted 13y ago