Having sat through this, the main thing that irked me was Matt's lack of empathy towards impacted users.
Every time Theo tried to talk about the negative community impact or the perceived stability of the platform as a whole, Matt forcefully steered the conversation back towards criticising WP Engine.
Matt seems more concerned with retribution towards WP Engine than doing what's right for the WHOLE userbase. It almost doesn't matter how right or wrong he is in his arguments against WP Engine, what worries me is that he is being vindictive in a way that undermines everything he's built.
That seems understandable, since (according to this video) WPE has apparently been on notice about this for a very long time and has been playing a game of chicken with WordPress.
Indeed, and like Theo, I finished the video with little sympathy towards WP Engine. I think Matt's trademark argument is sound.
But as Theo pointed out, the public was not privy to this long running dispute, and Automattic's drastic action came effectively out of nowhere.
Matt seems so preoccupied with this line of thinking (i.e. is WP Engine doing something wrong) and not nearly preoccupied enough with the impact on the Wordpress userbase, the long-term perceptions of the Wordpress brand, and the overall business confidence in Wordpress as a platform. There are ways to balance both, but Matt has chosen not to.
It is clear to me that Matt sees Wordpress as "the foundation" and "the trademark" and "Wordpress.com" and not the 25% of the public internet that uses it.
I'm also not a lawyer but it also sounds not sound. The "enforcement" of the WordPress trademark is so completely chaotic that it seems clear Matt is just using it as a weapon to extort companies he thinks he's entitled to.
WPEngine may very well be doing something wrong, but WordPress needs a clearer license with which to attack them with
I ask this earnestly, but have you tried it? It most certainly can write a pretty huge variety of code. Yes, it does often have errors, and it struggles with novel or complex problems (as the article points out), but for well known languages and frameworks it is still insanely impressive.
I tried it yes, it did not go well. First it gave me a snippet that looked correct but was not what I was asking for (I guess similar to a search engine). When I tried to point out why the proposed solution did not solve the problem, it could not modify it correctly. It kept oscillating between two incorrect solutions.
I think you've accidentally proven his point. Half the things you've mentioned have been around for half a decade at this point, and pretty much all of them have existed for at least 2+ years.
Frontend is still a fast moving space with a large ecosystem - and I get for some, that's not ideal. But this 'frontend fads' meme isn't really reflective of the current reality.
Rust, which is the greatest new hotness in the backend world is from 2015.
Other major languages in the backend world are at least 2 decades old (C#, Java, Python, C++, Ruby, etc).
C# with the .Net framework is an interesting example. Microsoft realized their original windows only approach was a dead end. They created .Net Core. But someone moving from .Net framework to .Net core didn’t have to relearn much at all, beyond initial config/bootstrapping, and which subset of the APIs had been implemented, because MS completed the implementation in stages.
On the flip side you have React, where you’re ostensibly using the same library for a decade, except halfway in between they made a change which completely flipped how developers weee supposed to use the library.
This is a disappointing and highly inflammatory article. There’s a nuanced and interesting discussion to be had here but the author chooses to demonise and insult entire communities. Does this rhetoric help anyone?
Making highly interactive web apps in 2013 was painful and it is revisionist history to claim otherwise. Keyword being “highly interactive”. If you’ve been mostly building traditional sites then it’s a different situation.
The author says he likes Knockout… well, I respect Knockout too, but having spent many years maintaining a decade-old enterprise Knockout app, it is painfully clear that React was actually real progress.
These frameworks - warts and all - do solve real problems. Just as you shouldn’t trust someone who tells you they’re perfect, nor should you trust someone who dismisses them as a con.
> There’s a nuanced and interesting discussion to be had here but the author chooses to demonise and insult entire communities. Does this rhetoric help anyone?
I mean, it is true that the SPA community has basically taken control of the frontend narrative. No beginner dipping their toes into webdev today can escape the gravity pull of React et al.
From the article:
> I’m angry because for the past decade of web development, I and so many others like me feel like we’ve been repeatedly gaslit, and that so many of the “merchants of complexity” refuse to acknowledge the harm that’s been done.
This I agree with. Beginners should start with generating HTML from their programming language of choice. Experts know better, but a complete beginner has no idea that this is the truth. Everywhere they're bombarded with frontend == React (or some other up and coming framework). Look at the amount of discussion generated by "Do I need to learn JavaScript before React?". This shouldn't even be a question, but you have people passionately arguing for the other side because "frameworks make your productive immediately, you can learn the basics later". The basics are HTML and CSS.
Oh, come on. So the guy uses some harmless exaggeration when selling himself on his own personal website & you're taking him to programmer jail over it?
Do you frequently launch into personal attacks on authors whose articles you disagree with?
If a medical doctors classifies himself as world class and then posts articles about medical matters, then my expectation would be his world class-ness is evident.
This guy's not writing an opinion piece about which brand ketchup tastes best. He has published an opinion piece in which he speaks authoritatively about matters related to the domain he claims he's a world expert in.
As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.
> As for the harmless exaggeration, it's not harmless. It's poison to my chosen profession.
Now you seem to be the one exaggerating there. While yes I agree that is a crappy way of describing himself, there is no reason to start being so mean about it.
It's typically used in sports and means an athlete or team has won championships in an international league, or a person is an Olympic athlete.
Coding is less explicitly competitive, but there is an element of competition to it. If you were a major contributor to a project that had displaced multiple international competitors, that'd clearly be world class. For example, Linus is a "world-class" coder because Linux is used all over the world and has displaced many operating systems.
No but on HN you should expect that criticism in that direction is valid. You can be world-class in certain niches but I doubt that calling oneself a world-class developer holds in the context of parts of the audience here.
It's ok to sell oneself but I'd be careful with exaggerations in a field with probably >1 million professionals.
If the author is joking about being world class, that would be kind of odd. So is saying you're world class at something in general (unless you're the tiger woods of that something and can demonstrate/back it up).
I have found it is commonly a trend with frontend/javascript/rails devs to be senior/lead/etc after a few years of experience. I think there's a variety of reasons for this, but going back to the author he probably is very adept at his given field. But to brand yourself as world class seems a bit much.
Personal attack? Nope. But if I saw that line before interviewing a candidate - I'd definitely probe them about it
Melbourne is a positive outlier and not at all representative of the rest of Australia. Finding senior devs in Brisbane is an insanely arduous process and its not uncommon to see positions take 6+ months to fill (at least at the places I've worked at). Even when companies start throwing money around like crazy, the talent just isn't there.
I've heard that Sydney isn't so great either. Once devs hit seniority they run along to join a hip Melbournian startup, get gobbled up by Atlassian, or just migrate to Silicon Valley.
Every time Theo tried to talk about the negative community impact or the perceived stability of the platform as a whole, Matt forcefully steered the conversation back towards criticising WP Engine.
Matt seems more concerned with retribution towards WP Engine than doing what's right for the WHOLE userbase. It almost doesn't matter how right or wrong he is in his arguments against WP Engine, what worries me is that he is being vindictive in a way that undermines everything he's built.
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