Zac Anger's Blog

a short rant about languages and people

2017-05-19

Tags: lang, community


I wrote this on Mastodon but decided to cross-post for whatever reason. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people talk about how great foo-lang is as an alernative to bar-lang, & it turns out they're just shit at bar-lang, or write deliberately bad bar-lang in examples to try to make foo-lang look better. Don't do that. If you can't write decent, idiomatic bar-lang, you don't get to hate it yet. If you can and are writing it like someone who's never read a tutorial on it intentionally, you're just making foo-lang's community look like assholes. Chances are foo-lang is pretty great, & can stand up on its own merits. Talk about those, not how bad your half-assed bar-lang is in comparison. I see this a lot with functional languages that compile to JS, especially, & it's sad, because most of those languages are actually really neat & there are a lot of good reasons to try them, but people saying 'look how horrible this JS is compared to this other thing' when the JS looks like it was written by someone who skimmed a jQuery tutorial once really doesn't present the community very well. So don't do that.

Also: a fun vim/Twitter trick (I also cross-posted this to Twitter): :set textwidth=140, then gq. You're welcome.