I find it interesting that a lot of prominent and respected programmers (jwz, Linus, Dan Bernstein, Theo De Raadt) write in this negative and caustic way, and not only is it considered socially acceptable but these rants get linked to and give the writer even wider street cred.
I think this is a detriment to our community, and I say this as a reformed (or at least reforming) flamer who used to take after that style. Actually I think one of the most positive things about participating in the HN community is that toxic commenting is not rewarded nearly to the extent that it is on other forums. It's taught me to be more civil.
I've interacted with enough top programmers who are always nice to know that flaming isn't a prerequisite to getting your point across. Besides many excellent HN commenters, I think of John Resig, Shawn Hargreaves, Sanjay Ghemawat. I strive to be more like them, and less like the people who are known for their flames.
I'd have to disagree, there's a big difference between flaming and being to the point.
I'd rather hear or read a "It fails because X Y Z" then having to go thru a lengthy prose or statement that says "it has been incontrovertibly proven that the restrictions and performance metaphors applied to X as it cascades thru Y is causing an undesired negative effect on Z. Therefore we can only conclude it's marginally very disappointing."
The content in question is very much to the point in my opinion, some of it I consider being written in jest so how this is "negative and caustic" escapes me.
You have to be polite and well spoken or efficient and terse, you can't be both at the same time.
I think many programmers are angry because they have to use so obviously broken technologies that have managed to capture the mainstream by only marketing, luck, ignorance or some combination of those. I certainly weep every time I look for jobs and there are ten times more jobs for PHP/MySQL than anything else.
I don't get the need for harmony everywhere. We're all adults and should be able to cope with someone saying the F* word in relation to a really shitty technology.
I accepted that for HN I have to fabric soften my comments but only because of that karma thing. Without score keeping (well, at least without the negative effects of having low karma) my comments would be more colorful. They would say 100% the same but in a more entertaining way. But as that's not acceptable for this community you only get my robotic self ;)
>> "Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date — Y2K bugs and all! Gosling…).
>> Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self).
> I'm still bummed that I failed to talk you in to making #!/usr/bin/javascript work back then, because I think that we were still in the window where we had a shot at smothering Perl in the crib…
It's like catching a beautiful glimpse of a future that never was.
(I might update the last three words of that sentence if I take the time to fiddle around with Node.)
I'm not a fan of Perl, and I have in fact a great deal more experience with JavaScript, but I don't see a command-line runtime and interface being sufficient to make it prevent Perl from taking over its niche.
Wasn't this one of the things that broke a whole bunch of twitter apps a while ago? And the reason the twitter API returns post ids as both integers _and strings_ in it's json?
(at least in Fortran you knew the variable "i" was a properly specified integer, dammit!)
[+] [-] haberman|15 years ago|reply
I think this is a detriment to our community, and I say this as a reformed (or at least reforming) flamer who used to take after that style. Actually I think one of the most positive things about participating in the HN community is that toxic commenting is not rewarded nearly to the extent that it is on other forums. It's taught me to be more civil.
I've interacted with enough top programmers who are always nice to know that flaming isn't a prerequisite to getting your point across. Besides many excellent HN commenters, I think of John Resig, Shawn Hargreaves, Sanjay Ghemawat. I strive to be more like them, and less like the people who are known for their flames.
[+] [-] Maci|15 years ago|reply
I'd rather hear or read a "It fails because X Y Z" then having to go thru a lengthy prose or statement that says "it has been incontrovertibly proven that the restrictions and performance metaphors applied to X as it cascades thru Y is causing an undesired negative effect on Z. Therefore we can only conclude it's marginally very disappointing."
The content in question is very much to the point in my opinion, some of it I consider being written in jest so how this is "negative and caustic" escapes me.
You have to be polite and well spoken or efficient and terse, you can't be both at the same time.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bad_user|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpr|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leon_|15 years ago|reply
I accepted that for HN I have to fabric soften my comments but only because of that karma thing. Without score keeping (well, at least without the negative effects of having low karma) my comments would be more colorful. They would say 100% the same but in a more entertaining way. But as that's not acceptable for this community you only get my robotic self ;)
[+] [-] tszming|15 years ago|reply
>> "Ten days to implement the lexer, parser, bytecode emitter (which I folded into the parser; required some code buffering to reorder things like the for(;;) loop head parts and body), interpreter, built-in classes, and decompiler. I had help only for jsdate.c, from Ken Smith of Netscape (who, per our over-optimistic agreement, cloned java.util.Date — Y2K bugs and all! Gosling…).
>> Sorry, not enough time for me to analyze tail position (using an attribute grammar approach: http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:proper_tail_...). Ten days without much sleep to build JS from scratch, "make it look like Java" (I made it look like C), and smuggle in its saving graces: first class functions (closures came later but were part of the plan), Self-ish prototypes (one per instance, not many as in Self).
>> I'll do better in the next life."
[+] [-] hedgehog|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bemmu|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavel_lishin|15 years ago|reply
It's like catching a beautiful glimpse of a future that never was.
(I might update the last three words of that sentence if I take the time to fiddle around with Node.)
[+] [-] alnayyir|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigiain|15 years ago|reply
(at least in Fortran you knew the variable "i" was a properly specified integer, dammit!)
[+] [-] iwwr|15 years ago|reply