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No, I am just curious. It seems overly defensive. In game development, there was/is a guy named Derek Smart who is famous for popping up in every thread on the
by krig 12y ago
No, I am just curious. It seems overly defensive. In game development, there was/is a guy named Derek Smart who is famous for popping up in every thread on the internet about one of his games and defending it relentlessly. The result is that every thread on the internet about one of his games devolves into endless flamewars. There are multiple examples of authors writing long responses to every single review of their books on amazon, resulting in a sort of game of insults between author and reviewers.
As the designer of something, you are too invested in it to handle someone going "this sucks!" well. My advice would be to sit back, recognize that the other person saying this is not invested to the same degree, is looking at the problem from the completely opposite perspective and is not familiar with the reasons behind every single compromise made, or why a certain feature seemed like a good idea at the time but turned out not to work in practice. Let someone else handle the defense.
It doesn't matter if there are valid criticisms to be made - inevitably, everyone describing the specification who weren't involved in writing it will misunderstand something, or leave something out, or quote something out of context or incompletely, or have completely different concerns in mind than the authors did - and as that author you are drawn to such things like a moth to the flame. But you have to resist the flame. After all, you wrote it, it does what you intended, you released it. If someone else wants something different, let them be unhappy and maybe if they are unhappy enough they will come up with their own thing.
- gillianseed 12y ago>It seems overly defensive. Based upon this one instance where he shows up and correct misgivings ? Seriously ? If anything you come across annoyed that your uninformed ranting was corrected.
- audidude 12y agoI didn't find any of hp's comments defensive in the slightest.
- rsanders 12y agoEvery one of hp's posts in this thread have been informative. Many of them were written as responses to cries arising from the mob with pitchforks and torches, but that doesn't reduce their utility. Given that both the original article, and your comment, made much of the "ASCII binary protocol", explaining the apparent contradiction certainly raised the signal to noise ratio here.
- krig 12y agoWell, I don't disagree with any of that. I wrote my comments in a bad mood and they came out harsher than I wish they had. I'm just thinking that if I was the author of dbus, I wouldn't engage the noise on HN. It was an honest question and I got an honest reply, and that's great. Hey, all I did in my comment was to quote from the spec. My complaint (well, one of them) is that it's a "binary" protocol but it requires parsing just like an ascii protocol, it encodes data as ascii values and it even embeds a full ascii protocol in the auth sequence. (not to mention XML for reflection with an embedded type DSL in attributes, ...)