You don't have to like what he said but he puts it in context and within the realm of Twitter - a 140 limited space of communication.
His original tweet was "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?".
Really. Can we not be critical on the internet any more?
And here is EVERYONE saying worse things about him in the comments!?
Go look in the mirror people. I'll take the downvotes.
[updated: typos]
I think that's a vast oversimplification.
I actually don't think this has ANYTHING TO DO WITH CODE. Anyone can walk into a subway restaurant, ask for a sandwich, take pictures of the people who made the sandwich, tweet their pictures laughing at how stupid they are and what a shitty job they did making your sandwich. You can do that to waiters, barstaff, cleaners, you can do that to anyone... but it makes you an asshole.
If you find yourself pulling up individual repos with <5 users and shouting 'Hey everybody look at these people recreating the wheel! What fools! Let's all point and laugh!' wouldn't you agree that's being an asshole? Is that bettering the community? No, frankly all you are doing is choosing to piss on a few people.
I have a ton of files on github and gist, most of them are absolute crap. I put them out there on the off chance someone happens by a similar issue/problem they might find something useful.
This morning there was a gist I was reading, and yeah it was mostly rubbish but it had the one line of code I was looking for.
That behavior needs to be encouraged by more people. We need to encourage people to put out their code and not delete it. Regardless of if it is crap.
If you see something picking up momentum with a growing base of users that you disagree with then by all means start raising the alarms; create a blog discussing the downside of using process X (examples of X could be nosql, sql, node, coffeescript, python, java, grails, groovy, haskell, go, maven, ant, gradle, etc etc)
I have a ton of files on github and gist, most of them are absolute crap.
Is it okay for someone else to say (without swearing or making personal jabs) in public that it is also crap?
And again, to emphasize, this is a sincere question.
Will it bother me? Maybe, depends on who it is. XxHackerPants420xX's tweet of 'Columbo is teh code suxxor' wouldn't bother me as much as pg choosing to write a personal blog post titled 'ode to Columbo's shitty github account'.
Is it okay? Meh. It isn't a community I'd want to be part of. I truly believe in the power of constructive criticism and I don't believe anyone can survive this environment by wearing their hearts on their sleeve. However, there's never justification for rudeness.
And I agree - constructive criticism trumps criticism.
Is it okay? Meh. It isn't a community I'd want to be part of
I'd prefer we save the public flogging to those that step over a hard-to-define line. I don't think that line was crossed in his case.
It's one thing to be critical. It's another to ridicule. Being critical is rational and objective. Ridiculing is a form of contempt, an emotion. When you ridicule, you are not taking apart what you criticize, you are trying to take apart the other person. Those skilled at this will often do it in such a way to make it sound as if they are being rational, objective, and focus only the work, when in fact, they are projecting emotions of contempt and cutting someone apart. The way our society is structured, you can "get away" with something like that because there's a fallacy ... that what you can somehow separate the criticism and feedback you give from the feelings that you experience (or suppress).
Well. You can't. Emotions arise and pass: they are real, they are experienced, and they affect behavior.
This is part of why I dislike Twitter - the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision.
It's a world of sound bites, and "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse" sounds wittier and has more jazz than "I really dislike this open source project and here's why."
That said, if a platform disallows you from being clear and fair to fellow people, don't use it. Ultimately the responsibility to be good to one another is your own to enforce, not Twitter's.
> "Can we not be critical on the internet any more?"
Honestly? No. The internet is full of flippant, callous, outright dismissals. It's reached epidemic scale - and it extends far beyond our little corner of tech. Everyone wants to have their little sound bite hating on something, and it's juvenile.
Given the current state of things, IMO criticism demands a higher standard than ever before. It's not that we can't be critical, it's that we can't be critical without qualifying and substantiating said criticism - there's just too much "hurr this sucks" floating around.
This may necessitate using communications platforms that permit more than 140 chars at a time ;)
> the 140-char restriction supposedly makes you to the point and concise, but in reality it just encourages snark and imprecision.
This is, of course, a false dichotomy. It does both, depending on the author, and the author's mood. The solution to this problem is to not follow jerks on Twitter. Follow cool people whose tweets have wit, poetry, interesting facts, and/or links to the same.
140 characters forces only minimalism, which exaggerates any number of latent traits, good and bad.
See my other post further down the thread. One of the prevailing attitudes I'm seeing in this thread is the notion that jerks/assholes are somehow exceptional. We're all more than capable of being terrible to each other, given the right context and the right triggers. Pretending that jerks are somehow a different class of people from "the rest of us" is folly.
No one is solely defined as "jerk" - most people have valuable things to contribute, the question is if the system is set up in a way that encourages good behavior.
I don't doubt there are many people who are able to tweet within 140 chars without behaving badly towards others. That's not the part under doubt, the question is if people behaving badly are in large part doing so because of forced brevity. We can make jerks contribute positive things if we set up the system correctly, we can also make more non-jerks into jerks by setting them up badly.
> "140 characters forces only minimalism"
This is a claim often trotted about, but I just don't see this. Looking at my Twitter feed it seems to encourage abbreviations, bad spelling, incomplete sentences, and truncated thoughts. Twitter proponents act like the internet was a giant cesspool of wordiness, and that Twitter was somehow the savior - I don't remember this internet when everyone was writing run-on sentences and long essays about their day.
Or rather,
replace 'critical' 'snarky'
You can, but why? What good is served?