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Peer-review and constructive criticism are valuable forces for change and improvement. Clearly there's some personal politics going on (insults having been tra

by Torn 17y ago

Peer-review and constructive criticism are valuable forces for change and improvement. Clearly there's some personal politics going on (insults having been traded) but jgc does raise some good points: the original code is very tightly-coupled code to whatever Berlios outputs, and would incur a large maintainability cost. It's also bought BeautifulSoup to my attention, which seems quite a neat utility built exactly for this sort of thing. For these reasons it's interesting, and is why I've upvoted it.

d0m 17y ago
Constructive criticism != demolishing someone publicly for a small snippet of code. + The word maintenance is incorrecly used there.
jgrahamc 17y ago
It would be foolish of me to pretend and try to hide my dislike for Eric Raymond, but it comes down not to a personal problem, but a problem with the way he presents himself. In this case, the juxtaposition of the quality of the code (which was truly poor) and Raymond's opinion of himself (recall that he claimed to be a Core Linux Developer at one point) made plain the problem that many people have with the man. Interestingly, his response to my criticism was not to say something like "You are right, but don't be nasty about it". Instead he wrote a blog posting going on about how right he is. Oddly, I share his concerns about HTML parsing, but I think he's wrong to not use an HTML parser and do everything by hand. Having done a lot of screen scraping work dealing with all the edge cases is a pain. And, also, Raymond claims to be very thick-skinned: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html
- gaius 17y ago
  I can believe that ESR was responsible for many cores on Linux.
- statictype 17y ago
  >Oddly, I share his concerns about HTML parsing, but I think he's wrong to not use an HTML parser and do everything by hand It looks like he didn't really understand how BeautifulSoup (or for that matter, xpath) works. For example, he seems completely unaware of the '//node' syntax which would completely sidestep the issue of encoding structure in the code.
  - youngian 17y ago
    And in his defense, someone who has not used BeautifulSoup might not realize how robust it is. I was deeply impressed with it when I used it for a scraping project - it's really good at handling tag soup and giving you powerful access to the parse tree. I would not have expected one tool to perform well in both those areas. ESR probably just made some assumptions about the capabilities of available parsing options that would be correct but for a few exceptional tools. Let's fault him for not checking his assumptions rather than name-calling about poor programming.
- gonzo 17y ago
  but in reality, his ego is quite fragile. My theory is that the left-over dregs of being a kid with CP has left him a) prone to overstatement and b) quite shy of being challenged. I actually got him to admit (in public, on his blog) that half of all he claims is untrue.
  - guitarjunkie 17y ago
    No fan of ESR, in any way but...really? Do you need to crap out your personal opinion on why he's the way he is? Do you know him? Honestly, i don't know you but, do you hangout with the guy?

by Torn 17y ago

d0m 17y ago

Constructive criticism != demolishing someone publicly for a small snippet of code. + The word maintenance is incorrecly used there.

jgrahamc 17y ago

It would be foolish of me to pretend and try to hide my dislike for Eric Raymond, but it comes down not to a personal problem, but a problem with the way he presents himself. In this case, the juxtaposition of the quality of the code (which was truly poor) and Raymond's opinion of himself (recall that he claimed to be a Core Linux Developer at one point) made plain the problem that many people have with the man. Interestingly, his response to my criticism was not to say something like "You are right, but don't be nasty about it". Instead he wrote a blog posting going on about how right he is. Oddly, I share his concerns about HTML parsing, but I think he's wrong to not use an HTML parser and do everything by hand. Having done a lot of screen scraping work dealing with all the edge cases is a pain. And, also, Raymond claims to be very thick-skinned: http://catb.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html http://catb.org/~esr/writings/take-my-job-please.html

gaius 17y ago
I can believe that ESR was responsible for many cores on Linux.
statictype 17y ago
>Oddly, I share his concerns about HTML parsing, but I think he's wrong to not use an HTML parser and do everything by hand It looks like he didn't really understand how BeautifulSoup (or for that matter, xpath) works. For example, he seems completely unaware of the '//node' syntax which would completely sidestep the issue of encoding structure in the code.
- youngian 17y ago
  And in his defense, someone who has not used BeautifulSoup might not realize how robust it is. I was deeply impressed with it when I used it for a scraping project - it's really good at handling tag soup and giving you powerful access to the parse tree. I would not have expected one tool to perform well in both those areas. ESR probably just made some assumptions about the capabilities of available parsing options that would be correct but for a few exceptional tools. Let's fault him for not checking his assumptions rather than name-calling about poor programming.
gonzo 17y ago
but in reality, his ego is quite fragile. My theory is that the left-over dregs of being a kid with CP has left him a) prone to overstatement and b) quite shy of being challenged. I actually got him to admit (in public, on his blog) that half of all he claims is untrue.
- guitarjunkie 17y ago
  No fan of ESR, in any way but...really? Do you need to crap out your personal opinion on why he's the way he is? Do you know him? Honestly, i don't know you but, do you hangout with the guy?