
You can't impress developers - cmbaus
http://baus.net/you-cant-impress-developers/
======
Confusion
Developers, in general, on average, chronically underestimate the time it
takes to properly execute an idea and how many iterations and discovery of the
exact needs of customers that requires.

I work at a company that sells a tool for model based testing and invariably,
at every customer company, there are developers that think our tool isn't
worth the money, because when we explain to them how it works and they think
'I could build that'. Yes, of course they could, just like they could also
build a Reddit clone in a weekend. They just don't realize (and is hard to
convince otherwise), just how much work it is and how much real world
experience is necessary to make it actually useful. As the article says:
developers are very hard customers and fortunately (for us, but not for the
industry in general) the decision makers often distrust/discount the technical
opinion developers have of tools they intend to purchase.

Tl;dr: developers too often say 'I can build that', when really, for practical
purposes, they can't.

~~~
jacques_chester
Humans are notoriously optimistic, and in particular, we forget about all the
things we have to do in order to achieve the things we want to do. (I have
been reading some research on this lately).

I used to harbour the "build it in a weekend" suspicion about everything, and
then I started building things. The world is a damn mess, is what it is.

~~~
bjz_
Indeed, I don't think it's just a developer problem. Making stuff is haard,
and the more you do it, the more you understand that.

Maybe it's related to that thing that has mentioned on HN quite often lately,
where the incompetent people are unaware of their own incompetence?

~~~
unimpressive
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-kruger_effect>

I'm not sure that it's Dunning Kruger so much as it is just not knowing at the
outset of the project all the pitfalls you'll get into making it.

------
jacques_chester
I've been active here for about 2 years now. I don't think there's been the
dreadful decline people are talking about; I think it's mostly nostalgia
talking. I know intellectually that I basically hated highschool and spent
most of it alternatively depressed or bored out of my skull, yet somehow that
period of my life has taken on a rosy tint.

Sometimes OPs are wrong or misguided and somebody with more experience or
expertise is there to point out why.

That's valuable.

Often you hear from the creators of things. Folk who are at the coalface of
some system, company or problem.

That's valuable.

So sometimes it comes with a bit of grunge and grump. I don't really care. The
rest is worth it.

~~~
clicks
I have similar thoughts. I've been here for a few years and I haven't observed
any specific decline.

I'm a little confused by the perceived offense as well: it's not good to tell
someone something sucks? I would _much_ rather hear honest thoughts about my
projects ("seems like a waste of time, poor implementation anyway, maybe try
$x instead?") than be given a false sense of security through unwarranted
praise. Of course what is not cool is downright snippy dismissals without any
substantiation, but I think those are still relatively rare.

Really the most tragic thing about it all is that pointing out the "middlebrow
dismissal" in a verbose comment/blogpost has become a meme unto itself. We
spend so much time on meta-discussions now. So here's my idea of how to
approach comments you guys feel are putting people down unfairly: neutralize
the meanness by following up that very mean comment by saying something like
"I don't think you're being fair, I think author of the post has made
something really cool because $y". And, the $y part better be something
technical, or else we're going further down into more non-substantive meta-
discussion discussion.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
Having been in the industry for some time now, I've observed significant
generational differences between how criticism is given and accepted.

When I worked with developers raised in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, they
generally wouldn't hold back when it came to criticism. If something was done
wrong, or if something was a stupid idea, they'd say so very bluntly and to-
the-point. They'd also be more open to receiving such criticism, and would re-
evaluate their own work or ideas without a second thought. They surely
wouldn't let it hurt their feelings, or anything of that sort.

Developers raised in the 1950s, 1960s and the first part of the 1970s tend to
be willing to give out some harsh criticism, but I've found they're often less
willing to accept it from others. They won't necessarily re-consider their
ideas or work when questioned.

The trend is more pronounced with developers raised in the late 1970s and
1980s. I've generally observed them to be far less critical of the work of
others, but also even less willing to accept criticism directed at their work
or ideas. Some even consider criticism to be unacceptable.

Now I've started working with some developers raised during the 1990s, and
their attitude is generally one of criticism being completely unacceptable.
They don't necessarily think that praise is necessary all of the time, but
they can often take any sort of criticism very personally.

While it may just be tied to age, experience and maturity, I'm thinking it
goes beyond such things. For example, I've seen several different professional
developers raised in the 1990s actually cry in the workplace when faced with
valid, and actually quite muted, criticism of their work. These people were
adults, over 20 years old. I'd never seen anything like it with the thousands
of other developers I've worked with over the years, even ones who were of a
similar age at the time, but born earlier.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what we're seeing here, too. Old
developers, who have a more accepting attitude toward criticism, are more than
willing to dish it out and receive it back. But the youngest generation has a
very different attitude toward it, seeing criticism as extremely offensive,
and even pseudo-criminal in nature. While many of them do just try to avoid
giving and receiving criticism altogether, I do find it kind of funny and
hypocritical when the more outspoken ones openly criticize those who are
critical of others.

~~~
henningb
I would argue criticism is communicated differently across generations, not
being less accepted.

There is a difference between a) "I don't like $x about your idea." b) "I like
$y about your idea. I think you could make it even better if you do $x
differently. For example like this: ..."

In my experience, older generations tend to do a) more, while younger ones do
(and expect) b) more. Not a bad development IMO.

~~~
obviouslygreen
Except that there's not always anything to like about an idea, and sometimes
things are _just plain wrong_. More often it's less clear cut than that, but
even then, points need to be made and people need to understand when they are
creating problems.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tact! I'm also all for explicitly stating your
opinion _as_ an opinion, which often has the effect of softening things in the
way you suggest, but even that should not get in the way of actual, valid,
useful criticism that isn't excessively hostile.

We baby kids (and ourselves) far too much. Everyone gets an award, everyone is
a winner, no one is necessarily wrong. It's crap, absolute crap, and this kind
of universal communicative pacifism is a symptom. It harms our expression by
limiting it.

------
latch
Took a break from HN (and others) for about 8 months at the end of 2012 and
start of 2013. The HN I came back to feels very different. Everyone knows
better and is eager to prove it by putting others down. Comments are no longer
about the OP, but about how the _OP is laughable, let me tell you how to do
it_. So sad.

~~~
kevinflo
I've noticed this as well and I've always felt it had to do with the fact that
you cannot downvote comments. Comments systems that allow for only upvoting
seem to skew towards surfacing loud comments versus reasonable comments.

The silent reasonable majority (that is less inclined to comment or even vote)
needs a way to help curate when things get unbalanced. Think about how you
might not end up actually clicking upvote on a comment that is reasonable and
that you agree with but how you most definitely would downvote the snide
negative comments that top HN comments sections all too frequently.

~~~
seabee
But you can downvote comments, if you have sufficient karma.

So is the problem that the people with the power don't exercise it, or that
people don't upvote the reasonable comments in a sufficient ratio to push the
bad comments down?

Meta-HN is not my favourite topic but perhaps it's time we had a review to
account for how the community has changed since the last one.

~~~
latch
The problem is that if someone forcefully demeans another while sounding or
being authoritative, it's intimidating for others to speak up. _Maybe he
really does know best_ , they think.

And, to be honest, sometimes they really do know best. When it comes down to
it, it isn't about being right or wrong. If someone makes an OSS project, or a
post, or anything, and you don't agree with it (or they are flat out wrong),
just don't be a dick about it. No one knows everything and we're all just
trying to do our best and get better.

~~~
shadowfox
I agree with you, especially on civility.

But I have often felt that there is confusion in some circles between being a
dick and providing accurate feedback without "sugar coating" (something which
a lot of people claim to provide/enjoy receiving). So I am not sure what can
be done here.

------
akkartik
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.

~~~
PommeDeTerre
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
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
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.

~~~
xtrumanx
I agree with you PommeDeTerre. It's hard for me to take this meme of "HN is
full of negativity" seriously when I constantly see people (like thedanfilter
above) complain about comments whose only faults are that they aren't full of
glowing praise.

~~~
mratzloff
This is a quintessential "middlebrow dismissal", taking an uninteresting
point, dismissing it with trivial technicalities, and pretending it added
anything to the conversation. The conversation then gets sidetracked to debate
semantics or pedantic details.

I've started down-voting these types of posts.

~~~
xtrumanx
Presumably you are referring to PommeDeTerre's comment as "middlebrow
dismissal" and I don't believe his intent was to sidetrack the debate with
semantic and pedantic details.

His comment is a new branch in the comment tree. If you find this branch
uninteresting you're free to not follow it. Sometimes some really interesting
conversations appear a few branches deep in the comment trees that are
completely off-topic.

I know where you're coming from and I've seen people use that "middlebrow
dismissal" tactic you've described when passionately debating. I totally don't
think that was PommeDeTerre's intent. It looked to me that he just believed
that the examples akkartik were bad enough to warrant pointing out. He didn't
attempt to tie that into completely dismissing akkartik whole comment.

And for the record, I don't agree with PommeDeTerre's comment at all because I
think he missed the point akkatrik was making when he listed his examples.

~~~
mratzloff
> _And for the record, I don't agree with PommeDeTerre's comment at all
> because I think he missed the point akkatrik was making when he listed his
> examples._

But that's my point. It's happening right now in this thread. :-)

------
artagnon
Appreciation and valuable feedback are two different things. What value does
"this is great; let me buy you a pretty unicorn!" add to the discussion?
Criticism and disagreement are central to growth. We are not here satisfy each
others' egos or make each other feel loved; we're here to criticize software
and make it better. Constructive criticism is our way of saying: "I have spent
time reading your code, and here is how you can make it better" -- I don't
have the time to read everything, so the very fact that I took the time to
read your code and write about it should make you feel appreciated.

That said, it is possible to go overboard and criticize something based on
irrational hatred. At that point, you're just talking about trolls: it has
nothing to do with developers not appreciating each others' work. Internet
trolls have existed since the dawn of the internet, and there are plenty of
resources on how to deal with them.

How you communicate your criticism is also important: there is no need to be
overtly negative. Just point out what's wrong, and how to correct it; your job
is done. Here's a recent instance where I've been overtly negative: the
correct response is criticism of my style, as Junio has done [1].

[1]: [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/22535...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/225354/focus=225388)

~~~
tracker1
I think it come down to the tone of any criticism. I don't mind honest
criticism, or even opinion. One thing that always seems to bug me is a sense
of arrogance around some people.

------
k-mcgrady
It seems a lot of people in the comments here are complaining about a decline
in the value of discussions on HN. Although I've noticed this I don't think
it's the fault of the people commenting. The quality of links posted to HN has
declined.

Rather than fact-based technical articles, useful new tools, and cool side
projects there are a lot of crappy articles repeating the same things we've
heard thousands of times about productivity, standing desks, work/life
balance, meditation. The articles rarely present anything new, they are mostly
anecdotes presented as fact.

I still find great things on HN and participate in interesting discussions but
sometimes when I look at the front page it seems more like a site for people
interested in self-help guides.

------
cmbaus
This conversation reminds of the old programmer joke:

How many programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Five. One to screw in the light bulb and four to say, "I could have done
that."

~~~
nullspace
Offtopic, but a quick googling led me to this:
<http://www.cs.bgu.ac.il/~omri/Humor/lightbulb.html>

Fun read!

~~~
idoco
Off-Offtopic! But I loved this one:

How many Prolog programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

False.

~~~
DHowett
How many _ed_ users does it take to change a light bulb?

    
    
        ?

------
MisterBastahrd
I become impressed when I see utility. Anyone can mock up a poorly featured
demo. Programmers tend to be a lot more receptive when someone says:

We created X, and here's the successful, maintainable, real world product we
used to implement it called Y

than:

We created X, here's a 10 line incomplete demo that isn't really useful for
anything and that we didn't explain well

~~~
spicavigo
Of course, expecting HNers to be intelligent enough so that the obvious
utilities don't need to be spelled out will be wrong. If you don't spoon feed
us, we will talk trash.

~~~
sltkr
So basically everyone that doesn't see the "obvious" utility of every pet
project is an idiot?

And you are saying HNers are the ones with negative attitudes?

------
namank
Developers are critical thinkers. If the person hasn't evolved enough to
account for the notion of being human; or if the context is such that critical
thinking implies critiquing without appreciation, you get what the OP is
complaining about. HN is definitely the latter since comments in this
community are largely reserved for criticism while the appreciation is
(usually) limited to upvotes.

I want to say it's the nature of the game but that's simply not true, we take
pride in being assholes. For Brython, while I was appreciated the amount of
work and the complexity that went into it, I was unimpressed by the
methodology.

~~~
testbro
> HN is definitely the latter since comments in this community are largely
> reserved for criticism while the appreciation is (usually) limited to
> upvotes.

I think this reasoning is fairly sound and possibly hints that HN may be less
unfriendly than the comments alone make out.

Anonymity tends to make criticism easier to lob around. I'm in academia and
even super-critical reviews tend to be prefaced by apologetic "good points"
before the submission gets eviscerated; even then a good reviewer will give
constructive feedback. I wonder if we could borrow this approach to commenting
to improve the atmosphere?

------
philwelch
I think this underlines what Hacker News has become. At first, Hacker News was
about people discussing technology, but also about building things and sharing
them, and it was a very supportive community that would actually give useful
feedback. Now we're more interested in being hypercritical dicks and gossiping
about the tech industry.

------
ecspike
Brython has bubbled up on HackerNews several times. It might not be "not
impressed", just "not impressed anymore."

Edit: Added quotation marks.

~~~
aroman
This. I didn't say anything on the Brython post from yesterday, but I
certainly wasn't very impressed having seen it at least twice before on HN and
what with the dozens of foo-to-JS transcompilers that have been cropping up
lately.

I didn't upvote, I didn't downvote, and I didn't comment though.

Maybe the lesson is "if you don't have something nice[1] to say, don't say it
at all".

[1] or meaningfully constructive, at least

~~~
ecspike
HN Search shows separate Brython posts from 3, 4, and 5 months ago.

------
manmal
I'm easily impressed by:

\- Huge projects which are still understandable within minutes,

\- Products which handle special cases, which in turn amaze its users (when
the dev has managed to get beyond her own use cases),

\- and devs who write more elegant code than me (clever use of patterns,
readability, yadayada).

It's easy to sniff at another dev's code, since nobody's perfect, and code is
often a compromise of a conflict of various factors (and each conflict can be
solved in various ways). But, this loop which has a workaround for a off-by-
one error which is caused elsewhere - has likely been written under time
pressure, and I might someday make the same mistake. I think it all boils down
to dev compassion.

------
ap22213
I think the OP misses the fact that of a few hundreds people who may view and
read an article, only a few will put forth effort to comment on it. So,
there's definitely some sampling bias. And, typically people put forth effort
only if they have motivating opinions, one way or the other. Adding the fact
that comments like 'awesome post!' tend to create a lot of noise and get down-
voted quickly, it's not surprising that many comments may seem negative. It's
the unfortunate nature of online forums. Oftentimes a few negative pieces of
feedback will hide substantial amounts of muted support.

------
dvhh
Well since you can have hardware emulator in javascript, we surely became less
impressed in what you can run in the browser. example that come in mind
<http://bellard.org/jslinux/index.html>

~~~
Joeri
This is why the internet is bad for your self-image. In the whole world there
are only a handful of people who could write something like jslinux. But,
because of the internet, we have all seen it and consider this the reference
to live up to. Well, most people cannot ever live up to fabrice bellard. I'm
sure my work will never live up to his work. Does that mean all my work is
automatically rubbish?

In my opinion, we should compare other people's work to our own work. If we
compare against the work of the very best then 99.9% of things will fall short
of what they should have been.

~~~
nairteashop
This is absolutely right. "Oh you create search algorithms at Bing? Mleh. I
find that Google's search algorithms are so much better." And you hear this
from people who can barely use grep.

I think someone's work needs to evaluated on their own merit, or with one's
own work, vs. some other genius's work.

------
quackerhacker
I agree with this OP to a level, that it isn't limited to developers. I had a
couple contractors in our house, and I swear they went at each others throats
nitpicking different ways each other could do a job better.

In regards to devs, I am a hacker (my criminal record proves it), but you'll
always come across people who are ignorant in what they know and unwilling to
be open to change or something they didn't have a hand in.

ALL OF US as coders need to be open to new libraries, code bases, languages,
and always willing to learn, but I think it's inherited with our skills that
we look for holes, errors, and other ways to optimize...to the point that it
comes off as an attack instead of criticism.

If you link on HN, EXPECT criticism (constructive hopefully), and just ignore
the ignorant trolls. A real coder knows how to give supportive criticism, and
credit where credit is due....Not sure if this validates my opinion, but I'm
easily impressed though :)

------
jplur
HN comments are heavy on critique. Maybe that's a side effect of an aggregator
and a culture that discourages trivial chatter.

A year of keeping up with HN has been a crash course on how to build things
for the internet. I don't know what my stack would look like without all the
unimpressed developers picking apart the industry news. Keep it up.

------
jamesjyu
> So don't try.

Stop! Don't tell people not to try. There's always going to be the vocal
peanut gallery at HN (and anywhere online) that will do whatever they can to
disparage projects.

But, this doesn't make up the majority of people reading. There are millions
of developers, hackers, designers, builders reading and benefiting from the
projects, code, and products that people post. These are the people who get
inspired or utilize the projects and blog posts about that cool new thing you
made in node.js, or the neat hack you did with Ruby and realtime sockets, or
that awesome new CSS technique.

The minute we stop showing the things we make, the trolls win.

So I say: TRY! Keep trying! Keep pushing out things that you made. Ignore the
trolls and focus on the constructive feedback.

HN is a beautiful thing, and it had a huge hand in pushing me to start a
startup. And, yes, it was a developer product. If I didn't try, it wouldn't
have existed.

------
forgottenpaswrd
Yes you can, if you are good.

I went to a mountain Bike trail competition, and watched the biggest masters
in the world in this. Everybody there knew how to balance over the rear
wheel(manuals), over the front(endos) and jump over a meter hight any
obstacle, more than 3 meters with a ramp.

There it was a kid, 16 years old or so. He was not as good as the much older
guys, but all of them were impressed about the guy. They knew that guy was
good just looking at him.

If you want to impress devs you have to be better than them, and this is very
hard on technical matters.

But you don't need to, because what makes a good product is not tech alone,
but how this tech applies to human beings. Things like design or human
interface, or understanding the market or people are also essential.

Quite often the tech experts are totally ignorant in those areas(no wireless,
less space than a nomad.lame)

------
arscan
I'm getting a "Not Found" on the link. Looks like the url changed slightly to:

<http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/>

(its not a cache, but i'll say cached here for those searching the comments
for a link to the google cache)

------
ExpiredLink
> _Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the
> Web._

Starting like this, what did you expect? Boring mannered small talk?

------
parennoob
Isn't that @holman's theme on your website? I don't recall him open sourcing
it. (Unless it's the other way round, which I doubt.)

~~~
holman
I pinged him. He stole it.

~~~
solox3
hey holman, you might want to look at the way your fonts are being rendered on
linux <http://i.imgur.com/wT1ue16.png>

~~~
stefantalpalaru
On my Linux system the rendering is just fine[1] using the infinality patches
for freetype[2] and subpixel rendering.

[1]: <http://i.imgur.com/22emWiZ.png>

[2]: [http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-
rendering-...](http://od-eon.com/blogs/stefan/improving-the-font-rendering-on-
gentoo-infinality/)

------
cjrd
The same holds true in virtually every content-oriented field: try making a
room full of comedians laugh.

------
ksikka
I am a developer and I was impressed.

------
Kiro
I find it way harder to impress users. They expect things just to magically
work and don't realize how much work is required even for the most mundane
feature.

------
kybernetyk
Actually I'm impressed that all these 'look what I implemented in a Turing
complete language' posts got so much attention for so long.

~~~
minopret
What's such a novelty about sequences of ones and zeros? And even that is
really just the separation of darkness from light. We've had that since
Creation.

------
wslh
I can quickly enumerate a list of things that impressed me from other
developers. If others in the HN can do the same would be a better answer to
this article.

\- <http://bellard.org/jslinux/> \- Google: impressed from the engineering and
scale side. \- Demo scene \- Exploiting difficult security vulnerabilities

------
davewiner
Hacker News is going through a predictable evolution.

In the early days it's a wonderful community of supportive collaborators.
These are the people who start unmoderated mail lists and discussion groups,
at least the ones that grow to the next stage.

It attracts people who want to be part of an unmoderated mail list or
discussion group. It doesn't matter what the topic is, they always show up.
They feel a sense of empowerment. They have arrived at the place where
decisions are made, and they have an equal voice! They will express
themselves.

Then it becomes about governance. How will we make decisions (even though the
decisions are about nothing).

Then even those people leave, because the atmosphere is so poisoned by the
negative people who say they hate everything and anything.

The good folk who started the community are long-gone, probably dreaming about
new communities where everyone gets along and is supportive and has good ideas
and doesn't get in anyone's way! Only to do it again, and again...

~~~
demachina
Yet when there was a thread on here about your product, Fargo, last week you
seemed to be quite fond of Hacker News, asking people on your blog to vote it
up so you could get more publicity.

If you don't like Hacker News why don't you stop reading it, posting to it and
pointing to it in your blog multiple times a week, glowingly when its in your
favor and harshly when its not.

You seem to being continuing your long running tendency to eviscerate anyone
or anything which criticizes you and make out like its "their" fault and not
yours.

You are also reinforcing the perception among many that you want attention,
even when it entails hacking people off to get it, like you are doing here.

~~~
davewiner
There are a lot of lurkers here, that's what I learned from that link to
Fargo. It was good for business. The commenters are mostly bizarre aliases for
people who are too cowardly to put their names on their rants. There are a few
real people and many of them manage to say what they have to say without
getting personal. Hope that helps. :-)

~~~
demachina
Dude… you get "personal" all the time. It takes a pretty serious double
standard to be so sensitive about it when its aimed at you, versus when you
are dishing it out being fine with it.

Not sure I've actually seen much aimed at you on here that is "personal". Its
mostly a lot of people frustrated with you for being the actual troll while
accusing everyone else of being trolls.

As for people using aliases, I think you should have actually learned the
value of them considering how much time you spend on the internet trolling.
Its a really, really bad idea to troll under your real identity. Its why so
many people are permanently irritated with you.

At this point I think I will stop trying to offer constructive criticism. Its
becoming really obvious you are a pretty classic troll, and quite good at it
too. You are mostly wasting everyone's time as only a good troll can.

~~~
davewiner
Funny how when you get trapped in your hypocrisy you get "tired" of offering
what you call constructive criticism.

~~~
demachina
Not sure I'm seeing the hypocrisy there, please expand.

I am mostly just getting tired of YOU trolling Hacker News, That is one
hypocrisy I'm seeing, you complaining about trolls when you are the one doing
it.

This thread just isn't productive or interesting any more. It seems to be
mostly designed to get attention. Based on the posts of others you seem to
have been trolling here for a while.

The other hypocrisy I'm seeing is you exploit Hacker News when it benefits you
(i.e. to plug your product) and trash it when it doesn't gush praise of you,
but that is normal for you.

Telling you my real identity would be silly since you are, most of the time,
not a nice person to anyone who criticizes you.

~~~
davewiner
The hypocrisy is this.

How could anyone give you _constructive_ criticism...

If we don't know who you are! :-)

------
calhoun137
There is a huge amount of value in constructive criticism, and really very
little value in praise. In order to reach your full potential you must be able
to handle criticism of your work. If you simply praise a person you are really
not doing them any favors, in fact you might be hurting their development by
creating a false sense of superiority that causes them to stop pushing
themselves as hard to succeed. However, you really are doing a person a favor
when you take the time to read through their work and offer constructive
criticism, because then you are helping them to achieve their full potential.

In fact, it's a sign of respect to give constructive criticism because the
implied message is: I found your work interesting enough to spend time looking
over it and thinking about; and I'm not going to treat you like a child who
needs to be coddled, but rather like a peer who is capable of handling
criticism.

~~~
mathgladiator
> really very little value in praise

Value in the $-sense, or in the emotional sense?

Why can't you give constructive criticism AND praise at the same time.

~~~
calhoun137
I don't mean value in the financial sense, but rather in the sense of helping
a person improve as a developer.

As for mixing praise and criticism, that is appropriate for certain
situations; for example when dealing with a student with low self confidence.
However there is a danger in praise which I outlined in my previous comment,
it really doesn't accomplish much besides stroking a person's ego, and that
can have unintended negative consequences for their long term development.

------
bambax
I had missed the first link about a Python interpreter in JS. I too find it
incredible and very exciting.

I'm not sure I want to manipulate the DOM in Python instead of JS/jQuery, but
it could prove super cool to write web workers in Python for instance.

The more you can compute in the browser the better. The client is where CPU
cycles go to die, we need to change that.

~~~
serge2k
I don't think it is unimpressive, but I do wonder why?

It's impressive from a technical standpoint, and that is in some ways enough.

But why the need to port everything to javascript? I don't use python for
things I would write in javascript and unless you are prepared to port all the
libraries (i.e. the thing that makes python so useful/fun/awesome) then why? I
can just use JS. JS is a language with good enough features. I don't need a
python that compiles/is intepreted in JS.

It's less that I am not impressed, and more that I think the effort is
somewhat wasted. Of course I still respect the implementer.

~~~
thedanfilter
Unless I am mistaken it would allow a person to create a web-based editor that
can compile and run the python code on the same web page. This seems to be
very much the direction that online programming tutorials are taking.

For schools, Universities, etc, it means not having to worry about platform or
installed software.

As most open source projects stall due to "more important things to do", it
would probably be wise to offer these people as much encouragement as we can
to better the chances that someone will complete one (and want to support it
in the future).

------
philtar
I'm impressed by the stuff I see here, all the time. I've only been using HN
for a couple of months but I, too, have noticed a decline in the quality of
comments. The comments used to be about how amazing the information in the
link is, what's so amazing about it, how it can be used, how it can be
improved concluded with brownie points for the OP. Now, all I read about is
how dumb the post is. Author wrote too much/little and doesn't know what
they're talking about. Just look at the comments for the 'Mistakes designers
make over and over again' post that's currently on the front page.

Someone should research this. Every-single-time a nice little community starts
expanding rapidly all the construction is gone and all we're left with is the
destruction. Reddit and HN being the most recent examples I can think of. For
a throw back: Anyone remember GameFAQs of 1998? Go check it now.

~~~
thejteam
I think the quality of the comments reflects the average quality of the posts.
We can't talk about how amazing the information is if the submitted link is a
3 paragraph blog post. So unfortunately the average commenter becomes the type
of person who comments on 3 paragraph blog posts.

Now here's a cool startup idea. A ranking system that takes into account not
only community upvotes, but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of
writing. Useful for both the submitted posts/articles and for the comments.

~~~
kybernetyk
> but an automated NLP assessment of the quality of writing.

What about non-native English speakers?

~~~
thejteam
That is the biggest flaw in the idea.

------
RobSpectre
While I can empathize with Olemis on the reception of Brython on Hacker News,
I'm not sure one can infer from that exchange (or the admittedly high number
of similar conversations) that developers are incapable of being impressed.
This just doesn't jive with my experience at all.

From the dozen Hack and Tells (<http://hackandtell.org/>) held around the
world to the hundreds of stories developers have of their first time looking
at ffmpeg's source to the growing number of live Javascript console demos
(great one here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jArKzo-h3R0>) to Dan
Kaminsky's DNS bug discovery - I feel developers are very clearly capable of
being impressed. It is a pretty regular thing.

It is, I will say, a very, _very_ hard thing to do. I encounter it each day in
my gig serving developer communities at Twilio. I have to bring my best work
to them every time I ask for their attention - anything less ends in derision
or, even worse, dismissal. Developers are natural skeptics whose daily work's
default state is broken. This engenders a very high velocity needed to escape
that skepticism.

Further, while HN certainly qualifies as a representative set, it is a
specific demo of developer. There is a wide swath of developers who don't
participate in this forum - poor reception here rarely means poor reception
everywhere developers live.

Finally, I would submit that if impressing developers is one's goal in a
project, one is probably set up for disappointment from the start. Amazement
is an extrinsic factor that makes a poor primary goal as many factors
governing success lie outsides the code one writes or the product one is
building.

I always feel happiest when I fix the problems I want to solve elegantly and
those solutions are widely adopted by the people primarily suffering from
those problems. Whatever people think outside that scope doesn't really affect
that satisfaction.

------
kablamo
HN navel gazing aside -- I think this is really good advice. Rather than
trying to impress your coworkers -- try to impress your users.

I think the challenge in many companies is getting enough access to your users
that you can tell if they are impressed or not.

I'm going to try to think this way more.

------
zbowling
No... Developers are really easy to impress. Show them something that will
save them time and effort to make something and they will flock around it. You
give them a tool that "automagically" does something tedious they used to do
and makes it easy and they will be there in a heartbeat with their wallets
open.

The python in javascript on the client side is a neat hack, but it's not
solving any known problem for the mass of developers here. If this showed
examples of performance and gained improvement over alternatives and it would
sell better here. Right now though, it pushes the idea that javascript isn't
good enough and we should be using something else in the browser (see DART,
CoffeeScript, etc and related flame wars).

------
Derbasti
I always try to make a point of showing appreciation when someone programmed
something cool.

------
cinbun8
Developers and engineers in general develop an ego with time. They take pride
in their work and are very protective of it. They also relish the petty
mistakes that others make and scoff at them - 'pfft I could have used X
instead of Y to do Z. Who uses Y anymore !?'.

For example, you can find this behavior when someone posts something about
problem X and there is a minor grammatical mistake or an opinion that is
expressed in the post that is unconventional. The comments section will zero
in on that and miss the big picture.

~~~
mratzloff
No, that's not a given; please don't generalize. Some developers have an ego
early on and deemphasize it over time. Others have never had much of an ego. I
have known several developers like this. There is no inevitable increase in
ego.

------
Aardwolf
I wonder if this applies to other professions?

E.g. what does a master chef think about the dish by another master cook?

Does an architect respect the buildings of another?

What about painters, musicians or writers?

~~~
davewiner
Those are great questions, and I've wondered about it myself.

In movies for example, teams form for projects that last in total a couple of
years, but for individuals, their work might just be a couple of months. I've
often wished programming worked like that, at least commercial projects. I
know a lot of programmers I'd like to try working with. But we don't do it
that way.

Also, there is a sense of history in most of those activities that isn't
present here. A young basketball player can tell you about all his role
models, going back many generations. I've seen it (thinking of Iman Schumpert
on the Knicks).

They listen to each others' music, eat each others' food, I'm sure there's a
lot of pettiness to the discourse, but in software, it's not uncommon for
people to compete with products they've never even tried. I can see that in
competitive products!

I think it will eventually get better. It is getting better over time. When I
was starting the idea of an individual creating software was VERY radical, and
there wasn't much support for it. Until I came to Calif, and met other people
who believed in the idea. Nowadays, they make movies about people doing that.
I would have told you 30 years ago that day would come, and people really
didn't believe it. Esp programmers. :-)

So it is getting better. I just wish it would get there faster.

------
jjuliano
Part of getting criticized is deciding whether you accept them or not. If you
try to fight a criticizing troll, you probably won't win. It's easy to get
drowned by criticism, so choose your battles wisely, just like Elon Musk, he
quit a political action committee because he sees that the group was too
cynical. And as experience teach us that too much cynicism tends to hoards
negativity.

------
hardwaresofton
I also read that story yesterday, and I thought, "this is pretty cool, I
wonder how it works. It probably compiles to JS" and clicked through and
looked at the site for a bit.

At the end, I thought it was a really awesome idea, but didn't comment -- I
guess I should have, and this blog post makes me feel kind of guilty.

I've learned my lesson -- If you like something here, or even think it's
remotely interesting, say so.

------
pessimizer
I'm impressed by stuff all the time. I think there's just a fatigue about
creating an emulator for or an implementation of X in javascript.

------
jsmcgd
I would argue that developers can be impressed. However the ones that aren't
are normally quite vocal. Commentary on the internet is normally toward the
extreme end of opinion and should be regarded as such. It is difficult to
adjust to this though as it is in direct contrast to real life where people
make deliberate efforts to moderate what they say.

------
toretore
I am a developer and I have been impressed by other developers many times.

That being said, I don't care much for "show off" posts like "Look everyone, I
made a functional web server in Brainfuck!". If you're _trying_ to impress
other developers, it is certain that you won't. It is not a worthy goal in
itself.

------
tszming
My favorite quote from Steve Jobs:

"Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their
motivations?"

------
ppradhan
Hemingway explains the phenomenon succinctly.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kw9spMYA-
XU#t=40s)

And remember - don't be self-effacing.

------
gverri
I remember a comment from PG about this matter. He too was not impressed with
all the negativity lurking HN.

It's not about admitting genius. It's about recognizing effort and
proactivity.

It's about stimulating good behavior. It's not about who's more badass.

------
richdougherty
This post reminds me a bit of the momentum-sapping negativity Dave Winer
describes in his old post on _Stop Energy_.

See: <http://www.userland.com/whatIsStopEnergy>

------
nrivadeneira
Just tried accessing this via the HN link but it was dead. It seems this is
the new location of the post:

<http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/>

------
progx
Developer != Developer.

Many Developer think that they are the best developer in the world and this
kind of people dont honor others work.

Since i use github, i see that not everybody think like you do (in the past i
agree with your statement).

------
viach
I'm just wondering, if one day someone submit a post on HN "Bob Smith just
have implemented AI-Hard in JavaScript as his weekend project, watch the
demo", what would be the first comment :)

~~~
Paradigma11
Why JS?

------
zzzeek
"page not found"

someone have a mirror please ?

~~~
stefantalpalaru
the URL was changed to <http://baus.net/posts/you-cant-impress-developers/>

------
cmccabe
Are the examples given by the author really that worthy of respect? If you
write yet another unnecessary Foo to Javascript translator, or over-complicate
your code to show off how well you know the dark corners of your chosen
language (both examples given by Chris), should people really be impressed?
And if people aren't, should they put on a fake smile and pretend to be?

~~~
DanBC
> should people really be impressed? And if people aren't, should they put on
> a fake smile and pretend to be?

Offering a critique doesn't have to be fake smiles, nor does it have to be
slagging off. People can ignore posts. Or people can offer calm advice about
why something is suboptimal.

~~~
VMG
Which was exactly what happened in the comments. I haven't read one impolite
response.

