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broken_broken_ | 6 months ago

I wrote a toy Kotlin compiler, for fun. Then one day a Jetbrains employee opens an issue which only says: “Why? Just why?”. Maybe it’s the language barrier… but I did not find that particularly polite.

On the other hand I open sourced my blog and received lots of small contributions to fix typos or such which were nice.

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conradfr|6 months ago

That seems a prevalent attitude at Jetbrains based on how they answers on their Youtrack.

It's hilarious, especially their UI team that only follow trends but still know better than their users.

brabel|6 months ago

The guy was probably upset that someone might be trying to compete with them while their compiler is itself open source. But it still sucks that they couldn’t be more subtle about it. In the end both they and you got upset. A small change in his tone and you might both come off with a nice feeling, him for knowing you were just playing around, and you for perhaps getting recognition from a Kotlin dev.

bruce511|6 months ago

Obviously I can't change how it made you feel, and as such it was a crappy reply to receive, but on one level at least it's a genuine question that projects should have an answer for.

It kinda matters if you build something as a proof of concept, or you build it to exercise some new technique, or you build it to improve the state of the art, or you build it as the foundation for a product etc.

You wrote it "for fun". That's an excellent reason to write something. I can appreciate your effort in that context. It's going to have rough edges etc. And when it's not fun anymore you move on.

Someone else might write the same thing, but for a different reason. Maybe they want a "better Kotlin compiler". They intend to make it perfect, build a product around it and so on. This sort of project encourages a different level of scrutiny than something fun.

So giving context to a project helps attract the right kind of attention. And more importantly the right kind of other-peoples-time.

But yeah, asking like that is not terribly polite.

fastasucan|6 months ago

>genuine question that projects should have an answer for.

Just because they take issue with the wording doesn't mean that they don't have an aswer for that question. Also, that is an awful entry point for a discussion about the purpose of the project.