
BabelJS creator laments open-source development - mikewhy
https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/879282797915119616
======
nodesocket
Unfortunately in my experience (founded and built a developer focused SaaS
that is profitable) projects or products that are for engineers is a soul and
gut wrenching market. Developers/engineers are perhaps the worst kind of
customers. I am an engineer, but these days I enjoy business, finance, and the
process of building a company more than pure technology.

Engineers have insanely high standards of products. They expect you to be
using the latest and greatest tech and design. If you're running a LAMP stack
SaaS, must be crap. They will sit and flame war for hours about tabs vs
spaces, syntax, best practices, formatting.

Then there is trying to convince an engineer to pay for a product. Besides
engineers typically being extremely frugal (I think it stems from the
enjoyment of micro optimizing spending and finances), they'd also rather just
build that product themselves. After all, what's the point of being an
engineer if they can't just build it themself?

Great engineers will custom build product and tools for internal use, where
great founders will find other products and companies that solve the problem
and pay for them.

~~~
naiveattack
This is nonsense. And therefore dangerous if used as some form of inspiration.

Great engineers do cost benefit analysis. They solve real problems.

Great engineers do not just write code for everything to inflate their own
egos.

My apologies if I missed some form of too-subtle sarcasm here.

~~~
nodesocket
Honest question, have you ran a business before?

~~~
0xffffff77a81g9
I don't know your definition of "ran a business", but maybe my story can fit
in it.

We started a business five years ago. At the beginning, we were only two guys,
but the team have been growing since the last three years.

To be honest, this have been a super awful experience​, mostly due to give
support to clients. Of course, we have had awesome clients, but many of them
have been a constant source of stress and frustration.

I'm planning to change my job in the near future, and the only thing that I'm
sure is that I don't want to repeat this.

I'm sorry for the lack of details, but I can't tell much more in a public
forum

------
tootie
"There are 2 kinds of programming languages: the ones people complain about
and the ones nobody uses" \- Bjarne Stroustroup

I hope Sebastian can take the complaining as a badge of honor because so many
people are so focussed on his product.

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kosinus
One of the ongoing narratives here on HN and elsewhere is that there's ‘a new
JavaScript framework every other week’, as if that's a bad thing.

A bit further down the thread, Sebastian says:

> Revel in fragmentation and duplication because without it there's stagnation
> and it stifles innovation.

And that just resonates with me. We have a large amount of fragmentation in
JS-land, but also an incredible amount of innovation. That sparkly new hobby
framework written by your random Joe Programmer may contain a brilliant idea
or two, and for that it's already a net-positive addition to our world.

There's this idea that you'll get hopelessly lost trying to find your way
through some sort of framework jungle, but what we really have is options and
innovation. If you don't want the hassle, then by all means just go with
something obviously solid, stable and here to stay, like Ember or AngularJS.

~~~
WkndTriathlete
Innovation is good. I think the knock against "a new JavaScript framework
every other week" stems from seeing JavaScript tools, frameworks, and
libraries throwing aside 60-70 years of solid design patterns and
architectural principles in favor of "minimum viable product" in order to be
"first to market." This has resulted in a plethora of relatively immature
tools and frameworks that are just better enough than the previous generation
of tools to warrant using, but use of the new tools and frameworks to engineer
quality software also results in a lot of frustration.

For an exercise in what I describe above, try taking an existing AngularJS
(v1.x) application, add some non-AngularJS components using ES6, then attempt
to generate a comprehensive test coverage report over all of the components in
a single testing pass using Gulp, Webpack 2, and Karma. Bonus points if you
figure out where to add Istanbul correctly on the first pass through it.

------
draw_down
Yeah, and people can be really shitty about open-source JS projects in
particular. (They bring all their grumpy "JS fatigue" baggage along.)

Maybe the best thing is if you can get hired by a company with the purpose of
working on an open-source project?

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andreasgonewild
Word. Anyone who's not famous and tries stepping out of line will be put
through the same meat-grinder. The majority seem to think that the way to get
anywhere in this world is to make sure that no one else gets there first,
which couldn't be further from the truth. That being said, there will never be
any progress without people stepping out of line.

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zuck9
> I remember Babel being attacked early on by people on TC39 and members of
> the browser teams.

> I don't just mean "Babel sucks" I mean "Babel was written by incompetent
> developers".

That's hard to believe. Does anyone know something like that was posted
publicly?

------
2017throw
Not letting JS die should not go unpunished!

