There seems to be a rather unrealistic assumption that people who don't like your product (be it website, framework, sandwich) owe you well-reasoned feedback. It's a great and useful thing to get but the fact is, most people are interested in solving their problem and unless they are quite sure your product is the best way to solve their problem, they'll simply move on.
Perhaps this is an artifact of how seriously the Twisted people and their 'lead hacker' take their project. But the twisted-centric view of the world leads to petulant posts full of odd statements:
My main point here is that if you're about to undergo a re-write of a major project
They wrote Tornado, they didn't 'undergo a rewrite of Twisted'.
For a tiny fraction of the effort invested in Tornado, FriendFeed could have worked with us to resolve many of the issues creating that chaos.
Interfacing with an another team to solve problems in a framework they didn't like (even if just aesthetically) would have probably taking significant resources for close to zero return.
There's quite a bit more in the same vein. It's wonderful that the Twisted people care. But perhaps a little too much.
I'd be pretty damn upset too if some other project got a lot of press for an announcement which included comments undermining the quality of my project. Sorry, but if you're going to strongly imply that my project's ease of use and performance are subpar, them's fighting words.
The comments were really in passing. 'Looked at it, wasn't for us', more or less. Perhaps them's fightin' words. But getting huffy about them probably helps your project even less, given they'd have otherwise gone largely unnoticed.
And not responding to disparaging comments helps your project?
I think he makes a pretty strong case in this article.
It's a bit passive aggressive though, I.e. "hey I don't have any sore feelings about it, but they went about it like real jerks". Just come out and say they were real jerks without the "I don't have sore feelings" crap. We can tell you didn't like it, and I'm completely OK with that.
I think the mindset that created Tornado is one that a lot of us share as coders. If there's an existing framework to do something but it's messy in your opinion, and the job you need to do is simple enough and not covered very well by that existing framework, well then often it costs a lot less in terms of investment to build it yourself. Then you get exactly what you need too, and nothing more (which increases complexity). It worked out for them too!
I also think twisted could market itself better, but that takes effort that could be spent elsewhere, and I doubt they're all that interested. We'll see.
And not everything is a cold impersonal engineering decision. Programmers are people (really! we are!) and people like greenfields and blank canvases and fresh starts.
And I'd also submit that a team of talented developers almost certainly will make a superior product if they have the ability to use the original as a reference and resource. The saying "Pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land" comes to mind.
Agreed. Greenfield projects are far more enjoyable, and you tend to learn more. Obviously we can't always do that and succeed, but they did well enough in this case. Preferably they'd go easier on the remarks about existing open source frameworks though.
That's not "wasn't for us" that's a very vague comment insulting the project. If that were true, I think it is fair to at least describe what they were -- or the nature of them -- or something.
I'm not familiar with the project or this guy in particular, but man, he seems awfully abrasive. Sarcastic and bitter came to mind as I read them. I have no dog in this fight, and one could fairly assume that these 2 discussions are just not his best moments. But from what I've seen...
Ok, but there are products, and there are products. This is a product that you can hack to your heart's content, not something sitting on a store shelf that you can take or leave. Oh, yeah, and you get it completely for free. And with a license that you can base your N-million dollar company on it with no ifs ands or buts. And could potentially save you thousands of dollars worth of work. And with developers willing to contribute their own time to make it work better for you. And yet you can't write an email saying "hi, this almost works for us, but has a few issues I'd like to talk about (and potentially help fix)".
The assumption isn't that they owe you feedback: the assumption is that it was not in their best interest to create another instance of something that already exists. That assumption is supported by the fact that Tornado has the exact same goal as Twisted. Effectively, it is a rewrite, especially if they have obviously looked closely at Twisted's code for inspiration.
No, a CTO didn't waste money; he got exactly what he needed, cleaner, simpler. No - it doesn't handle every single edge case, nuance, platform - but it does exactly what they needed. They didn't need to spend time patching and grokking twisted, or needing to deal with any rough edges to ramping personnel up on it. They had a job to do, and they did it.
Now that it's out in the wild, maybe someone will cross-pollinate, maybe changes will go in both projects. But the good thing is that they got their job done.
I made tornado work on top of twisted by removing 1,389 lines of code and adding 92 (and I believe most of that was adding compatibility wrappers to keep the API mostly sane).
My effort is not done -- I do have a lot more code to remove. Where it is now, with having mostly just removed code, I can do far more than tornado can do out of the box, and I can do it starting with the same API. I did not modify twisted.
And seriously, these are all insanely smart guys. If they have to "ramp people up", they have to do that with their new framework anyway, but I can't believe that if I can understand twisted, they can't.
I haven't yet looked at tornado, and it's been years since I seriously investigated twisted. That said, even though it's less code to use twisted, not counting twisted, it's going to be quite a lot more after counting twisted, most of which, as you note with "can do far more than tornado can", they didn't want in the first place.
When there's a bug in tornado as it is, they can just fix it. If there was a bug in tornado-on-twisted, and if the bug were in twisted, they'd either have to wait until the twisted maintainers fixed it, or fix it themselves. If themselves, then they end up maintaining the internals of twisted (at least for the time between fix and having the patch accepted), which means they have to keep track of and understand a lot of code that, as you note, they don't have any use for in the first place! In that situation, I might choose to write my own as well.
That Firefox is not a rewrite of IE, even though they accomplish the same task, was my point. Perhaps a better analogy would be the JVM and .NET's CLR.
Interfacing with an another team to solve problems in a framework they didn't like (even if just aesthetically)
I think dislike for aesthetic reasons is one of the best reasons to do your own rewrite. I can imagine that proposing radical changes to e.g. API style of an existing FOSS project would be the most difficult up-hill battle.
If you accept the validity of the cathedral vs. bazaar premise, then the pattern of OSS fragmentation ultimately works against the general community's interests.
On the other hand, competition in the course of establishing best of breed constructs for emerging paradigms is healthy, as a preliminary stage before community building per Raymond's model.
Perhaps this is an artifact of how seriously the Twisted people and their 'lead hacker' take their project. But the twisted-centric view of the world leads to petulant posts full of odd statements:
My main point here is that if you're about to undergo a re-write of a major project
They wrote Tornado, they didn't 'undergo a rewrite of Twisted'.
For a tiny fraction of the effort invested in Tornado, FriendFeed could have worked with us to resolve many of the issues creating that chaos.
Interfacing with an another team to solve problems in a framework they didn't like (even if just aesthetically) would have probably taking significant resources for close to zero return.
There's quite a bit more in the same vein. It's wonderful that the Twisted people care. But perhaps a little too much.