It's all about being productive

Stuff like this makes me sad:

https://twitter.com/tjholowaychuk/status/331886624612941824

Also, the github issue where TJ requests that everything gets rewritten in plain JavaScript: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/issues/766

 

We’ve been here before
Language discussions aren’t new (nor is vim vs. emacs). In the GNOME community we’ve seen a ton of them. Just recently there was a huge one at the DX Hackfest.

GNOME/Mono developers have certainly received their dose of crap thrown at them. But so have GNOME developers that preferred Vala, Python, JavaScript, or even just GObject/C. Whatever you seem to be using, it’s never the right thing for someone.

Have all these years of shedding words over it solved anything? Frankly: no. We are still seeing a large combination of languages being used and all of those projects have good reasons to do so.

I get TJ’s point though: by using CoffeeScript, the rethinkdb people are making it harder for the wider JS community to contribute to their project. But…

 

It really doesn’t matter
Most open-source projects (or modules) don’t have a ton of contributors. It’s usually a modest team of core maintainers/developers that do the bulk of the work. And that’s fine: the success of a project should not be measured by the number of contributors, but by the quality of the software it produces.

This smallish team of core developers will have their own good reasons for picking up a certain language. They’ll use the language that they feel most productive with for the task at hand. And that’s a good thing, they are mostly the people that move the project forward.

The biggest barrier to contributing on a project is not the language, there are plenty of projects written in unproductive languages that get a ton of contributions. Any good programmer can pick up a new language up quickly (and TJ is more than just a good programmer, he’s a fantastic one, much respect). The bigger hurdle is the specific domain knowledge involved.

Let’s all agree to disagree and have some respect for each other’s opinions, they are all valid anyway.

 

PS: I’ll be heavily moderating comments that try to turn this into a flame-war. I’m writing this to find some more respect and understanding.

May 8, 2013 08:58 #gnome #mono #javascript #coffeescript

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