4 ms·

If the tool is just bad then there is no good reason to deal with the community.

by pekk 13y ago

lmm 13y ago
Disagree. A mediocre tool with a great community can let you get stuff done quicker and better than a good tool with a poor community.
- MaulingMonkey 13y ago
  Sometimes - not always. Especially if it's not merely mediocre, but outright bad as postulated. (I don't think Python is bad, but I don't have the experience with it to judge either.) All the community in the world is unlikely to make up for tools that I have to reverse engineer from disassembly to file proper bug reports against (too frequently necessary to even figure out if it's their bug or mine in the first place), or create workarounds for. If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place: It's all right there in the docs or obvious by design, right? (If the answer is no, is it actually a good tool?)
  - masklinn 13y ago
    > If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place Then there's no community, there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. See: the vast majority of lisps.
    - MaulingMonkey 13y ago
      > Then there's no community Communities survive my absence ;). But more importantly, the lack of a user community doesn't necessarily translate to the lack of an internal developer community outside the FOSS sphere, or lack of a feedback loop into that developer community. Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? For myself, I'd answer "none of the above". There are hundreds of devs behinds these tools, and I interact with next to none of them - and that works out great. > there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. I'm frequently entirely OK with this. Some of these tools will evolve without my input. Some of them will die (read: finally stabilize) when better alternatives surface (win/win!) Neither situation is generally going to be helped along significantly by throwing in my lot with an existing tool's user community. On the developer side of the equation, when even possible, joining is expensive: Time spent familiarizing with the codebase and coding standards, agreeing on bikeshed colors, wrangling contracts to avoid ending up like Sergey Aleynikov... > See: the vast majority of lisps. This may be heretical, but I'm afraid I don't grant that "the vast majority of lisps" were good tools, although I'll certainly grant that community inertia wasn't enough to save them.
      - lmm 13y ago
        > Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? I'd actually say yes to many of those. The main reason I switched away from my previous browser was the absence of certain extensions/userscripts; the reason I use the IDE I do is entirely down to the plugins.
LeonidasXIV 13y ago
> If the tool is just bad then there is no good reason to deal with the community. Python is not that bad and while I, like Armin, have been moving slowly away from it due to a number of reasons, it is still one of the most versatile tools in my toolbelt.
- whatevsbro 13y ago
  Could you tell me a little about the reasons for moving away from Python? I'm somewhat surprised by people saying it's a bad technology choice.
  - DasIch 13y ago
    It's not a bad technology choice. It's that people themselves evolve, get interested and learn new things. Armin apparently is somewhat involved with Rust now, I doubt that's because he is going to write web application in it but it's because he has become interested in developing applications that require a low-level language. Ian Bicking has been working for Mozilla for a while now and Mozilla is very focused on using Javascript... Important people in the Python community becoming interested in new things, learning new things, is not a bad thing, it's a very good thing. You want people with influence to learn new things, get excited about them. That's what sparks evolution, new ideas and creativity.

If the tool is just bad then there is no good reason to deal with the community.

by pekk 13y ago

If the tool is just bad then there is no good reason to deal with the community.

lmm 13y ago

Disagree. A mediocre tool with a great community can let you get stuff done quicker and better than a good tool with a poor community.

MaulingMonkey 13y ago
Sometimes - not always. Especially if it's not merely mediocre, but outright bad as postulated. (I don't think Python is bad, but I don't have the experience with it to judge either.) All the community in the world is unlikely to make up for tools that I have to reverse engineer from disassembly to file proper bug reports against (too frequently necessary to even figure out if it's their bug or mine in the first place), or create workarounds for. If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place: It's all right there in the docs or obvious by design, right? (If the answer is no, is it actually a good tool?)
- masklinn 13y ago
  > If a tool is good, I'm probably not turning to the community much in the first place Then there's no community, there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. See: the vast majority of lisps.
  - MaulingMonkey 13y ago
    > Then there's no community Communities survive my absence ;). But more importantly, the lack of a user community doesn't necessarily translate to the lack of an internal developer community outside the FOSS sphere, or lack of a feedback loop into that developer community. Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? For myself, I'd answer "none of the above". There are hundreds of devs behinds these tools, and I interact with next to none of them - and that works out great. > there's nothing shared and the tool ends up dying because there's only so much you can do on your own. I'm frequently entirely OK with this. Some of these tools will evolve without my input. Some of them will die (read: finally stabilize) when better alternatives surface (win/win!) Neither situation is generally going to be helped along significantly by throwing in my lot with an existing tool's user community. On the developer side of the equation, when even possible, joining is expensive: Time spent familiarizing with the codebase and coding standards, agreeing on bikeshed colors, wrangling contracts to avoid ending up like Sergey Aleynikov... > See: the vast majority of lisps. This may be heretical, but I'm afraid I don't grant that "the vast majority of lisps" were good tools, although I'll certainly grant that community inertia wasn't enough to save them.
    - lmm 13y ago
      > Do you use your browser because of it's user community? Your media player? Your IDE? Your VM manager? Your task tracker? Your IRC client? System APIs? The standard library of your favorite Language? I'd actually say yes to many of those. The main reason I switched away from my previous browser was the absence of certain extensions/userscripts; the reason I use the IDE I do is entirely down to the plugins.

LeonidasXIV 13y ago

> If the tool is just bad then there is no good reason to deal with the community. Python is not that bad and while I, like Armin, have been moving slowly away from it due to a number of reasons, it is still one of the most versatile tools in my toolbelt.

whatevsbro 13y ago
Could you tell me a little about the reasons for moving away from Python? I'm somewhat surprised by people saying it's a bad technology choice.
- DasIch 13y ago
  It's not a bad technology choice. It's that people themselves evolve, get interested and learn new things. Armin apparently is somewhat involved with Rust now, I doubt that's because he is going to write web application in it but it's because he has become interested in developing applications that require a low-level language. Ian Bicking has been working for Mozilla for a while now and Mozilla is very focused on using Javascript... Important people in the Python community becoming interested in new things, learning new things, is not a bad thing, it's a very good thing. You want people with influence to learn new things, get excited about them. That's what sparks evolution, new ideas and creativity.