
Being Ridiculed for My Open Source Project (2013) - callumlocke
https://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/
======
Udo
I can't even count the number of times I made a short script/tool for some
task that could have been accomplished by stringing together some highly
arcane command line invocations. Sometimes, I had legitimate reasons for this
because the "unix way" had weird edge cases or unwanted behavior. Other times
I just felt like it, or I didn't know a viable alternative existed.

I remember when I was working on a web server project in the late nineties,
one of my first commercial gigs, the whole thing was done in Borland Delphi.
As the maintenance programmer came in to take over, he berated me publicly
several times for not using regular expressions to do string manipulation. The
language did not even have regex support as far as I recall, and as he
replaced my very simple and easily-debuggable string routines with absurd
regexes in combination with an arcane regex library, I felt like the most
worthless programmer ever. Worse yet, people were praising him for his
assertiveness and competence. And then following his "refactoring", over the
next weeks, horrible string manipulation bugs and exploits started happening
in production. Turns out, he introduced lots of problems and nobody could fix
them. As far as I know the project was plagued with these kinds of bugs until
it went offline years later.

The loudest hecklers are often the most successful at projecting an appearance
of competence that may not necessarily be warranted. They derive energy and
peer recognition from publicly berating colleagues for decisions. Whether they
are factually correct or not, little is gained by letting them drag you down.

It's not the end of the world. Most of the time, there are many ways to
achieve a result in programming. Writing a little script is certainly a valid
solution, and if it makes you more productive for doing a specific thing, or
even just as a learning exercise, why not?

~~~
sageabilly
_The loudest hecklers are often the most successful at projecting an
appearance of competence that may not necessarily be warranted. They derive
energy and peer recognition from publicly berating colleagues for decisions._

Absolutely a great point, and a very ironic one to see considering the
comments on Linus Torvalds that have been going around on HN lately.

------
asb
I feel a little uncomfortable about this being posted again. The whole
incident was very unpleasant, but everyone involved regrets it deeply. Steve
Klabnik particularly has commented several times how greatly he regrets the
role he played in discouraging a fellow programmer (as well as of course
making a public apology). He's currently doing an admirable job encouraging
newbies and making the Rust community a welcoming place to all. He is the
primary author of [https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/](https://doc.rust-
lang.org/book/), which many of you may have read.

~~~
212d1d
Steve Klabnik: "Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole."
This should not be included in a sincere apology.

------
CommonLisper00
I wonder to what extent the abuse she received was just due to her having used
JS. Klabnik and Haines are both huge Rubyists and Rubyists seem extremely
hostile to JS and those who use it, probably because of Node.js stealing
Rails' (and by extension Ruby's) thunder and a growing awareness that JS has
inherent advantages over Ruby for which Ruby will likely be unable to
compensate, such as shipping in every major web browser and having a modern,
efficient, jitting VM in the form of V8 that's an order of magnitude faster
than MRI.

~~~
gaius
Wow, Klabnik was involved? If he had done it on HN he would have had to
#hnwatch himself...

------
mbrock
Especially strange because the project in question seems to be pretty simple,
useful, and decently documented. It doesn't even seem to be near the
"laughable" threshold to me, and I'm a pretty spiteful and cynical person.

I have a hunch that maybe some people interpret a GitHub project page as a
claim that "this project is amazing and better than other things and you
should use it," when actually the only implicit claim is "here's a free
thing."

A related question has to do with package namespaces, e.g. npm. This project
claims the name "replace" on npm. What does that entail? How do we decide if
it's a "legitimate" claim? If someone makes another replace utility that's way
more sophisticated or beautiful or whatever, should the name be reassigned?

Npm has a policy:
[https://www.npmjs.com/policies/disputes](https://www.npmjs.com/policies/disputes)

Even more abstractly, it's pretty interesting how names, versions, URLs, and
publishing becomes an area where "politics" come into play, more than one
might expect given the nature of the code artifacts. That stuff brings up all
kinds of policies, claims, etc.

------
rfrey
Previous (extensive) discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767)

