I would add that crappy processes and tools are usually in place because the management/leadership in an organization has made them too brittle. While you don't want to wild-west every "critical" issue, bad spots in a process will naturally highlight themselves over time.
Let your tools and processes constantly evolve instead of blindly subscribing to a methodology, and you'll be in much better shape.
Okay, fine. The way he handled this particular issue seems like a dick move. Being one of the godfathers of computer science isn't a license to act like a jerk.
There's no question he's right, but there's nice-right and jerk-right.
This sort of response seems like it only inhibits people's desire to get involved.
> This sort of response seems like it only inhibits people's desire to get involved.
How many projects have had as many people involved as the kernel? Not just software, any project. With people coming and going and working on whatever they want. For 20 years.
It's hard to fully articulate how wrong this and so many other comments in this thread are.
People have the right to be offended, they however DON'T have the right to not be offended.
Linus is a nice guy, he works well with others and has built some of the most amazing software in the world today. I work on the kernel and other system code on a day to day basis and have participated in threads with Linus before. When you are wrong he tells you so, in a very clear manner that outlines exactly WHY you are wrong.
Sure, he isn't always concise and succinct but that isn't really the point. If he wants to interject a few choice "swear words" to describe how badly you did something that's fine by me. As long has he describes exactly what is wrong and how to fix it.
People need to get a lot less wrapped up in HOW something is said and focus on WHAT is said. The essence of Linus's comments on this pull request can be summarized easily. GitHub's pull/request features are inadequate for kernel goverernance - and as the creator of git and designer of the inbuilt pull-request functionality he thinks this is subjectively retarded.
If you read past any of that and start saying crap like "he could have been more polite" to him then you have obviously missed the point. It's not his (or anyones) job to cater to peoples inability to grow a skin.
Yeah this is exactly what I thought when I read this. There's no excuse to act like a dick, and he totally is in this thread - name calling and being super angry when nobody else is. I'm a little disappointed.
Does this scare anyone else, at least just a little bit?
It seems so odd to me that now Flash is being de-emphasized, we're picking it up all over again. Yes, there are some performance benefits and cross-platform problems you can jump over... but isn't this just a proprietary, non-standards way to approach web design all over again?
Yes. I share your concerns. This attitude that HTML and CSS and browser UI somehow need to be replaced by a custom layer of JavaScript ultimately is a slippery slope towards things like applets and swfs... towards a byte-code compiled web. See also: Native SDK.
We've got all these mechanisms built up to deal with web UI that is constructed with HTML and CSS in terms of accessibility, in terms of search indexing, in terms of browser plugins and extensions, in terms of web services and bookmarklets, in terms of UI debugging... Also, the web UI you get with HTML and CSS inherits a bunch of standard behaviors and defaults that make for more consistent experience from site to site. Consistency in UI mental models is a great thing.
I can't think of a single argument FOR this idea of rendering UI entirely in canvas that shouldn't instead be met with a response of "so lets make HTML and CSS better!" Instead of improving the open standards of HTML/CSS, people are pushing towards proprietary solutions.
Sometimes even the best intentions can go awry. I don't think this is malice so much as ignorance.
Sorry, but those things are totally different. Applets and flash are plugins - proprietary additions to browsers that live in a black box. Canvas is a standard, and is part of the browser itself. HTML and CSS don't need to be replaced for most things, but this is an interesting experiment to see whether for a certain class of applications, canvas can outperform the DOM and take care of some of the cross browser issues that CSS is plagued with. I don't get why people are so attached to HTML and CSS.
I'm attached to HTML and CSS because I remember UI programming before HTML and CSS. I'm attached to HTML and CSS because of the debugging tools for HTML and CSS UI. I'm attached to HTML and CSS because it allows for bookmarklets, and screenscraping, and browser plugins/extensions. I'm attached to HTML and CSS because it creates a beautiful separation between front end and back end code. I'm attached to HTML and CSS because UI designers can skin software built by JS programmers by tweaking a CSS file without having to know any JS. I'm attached to HTML and CSS because the web is HTML and CSS.
It's still an HTML document. Bookmarklets and screen scraping are most certainly doable. The latter, probably easier than it normally is. How is this presenting a problem?
Browser plugins and extensions are entirely unrelated to HTML and CSS, but if they were related it'd still be a non-issue since this is still an HTML document in a browser.
Just because things sucked before HTML and CSS doesn't mean that they're the pinnacle. I personally find debugging HTML and CSS incredibly frustrating. Uneven standards implementation across browsers doesn't help either.
And I am seeing first hand how UI designers find CSS (it's NOT intuitive at all).
We build things with HTML, CSS, and JS that they were never designed to be building blocks to. At some point we either have to accept that these are not up to scratch or we can continue to see the web eroded in favor of native platforms (most of which are even more closed).
Attitudes like this makes this quote ring true: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
Actually I do find the DOM oppressive, especially at 4am in the morning before a deadline ;)
On a serious note, there is no historical precedent for standards committees to competently steer the technical underpinnings of a platform as dynamic and fast-changing as the web. Web development is unwieldy right now because of this.
I never asserted "that HTML, CSS, and JS somehow have some predefined subset of things that were intended to be built with them." At the end of the day, software performance is based on architecture. The architecture of a platform or a language or a framework is intertwined with it's intended purpose. Anything otherwise is just bad engineering.
HTML and CSS are reasonably well engineered tools. They just rely on the web from the 90's, a set of interconnected documents. Not the application and data driven web. The architecture is not designed to handle these new paradigms.
And JS? JS was designed to do form validation. Nowadays it can run your entire web stack, it was NEVER designed to do this. Can you build awesome web apps with HTML, CSS, and JS? You bet. But don't kid yourself that it's easy. Tools like Cappuccino, and Sproutcore, and Blossom are awesome and help sort of solve this issue but they do so at huge performance costs.
Someday the web will be written using the tools and frameworks that don't drive developers to frustration. How soon that day comes will have a lot to do with how attached we are to the outdated architectures used by the web today.
Except it's entirely standards based. Canvas is part of HTML5 and the apps are built entirely in JavaScript. And the whole framework is open source with no proprietary components. Not sure how you got to those conclusions.
I don't mean to overreact, but so were <object> and <embed>, which were what Flash used. If they're creating their own canvas-based way of rendering a UI, it's not really using HTML5... it's just that HTML5 happens to be the container.
And just because it's open source, doesn't mean it's standards-based.
I'll have to dig deeper, but things like "HTML and CSS independent" feel very proprietary to me. It just feels like you're losing out on the shared semantic value of HTML, etc.
That doesn't make any sense. Canvas is a standard maintained as part of HTML5 by the W3C. How are they "not really using HTML5"? Just because they don't have some tags? That makes no sense. The web is not HTML and CSS. People need to get over that.
As for semantics and stuff, this isn't designed for documents at all, which HTML is perfectly suited for. This is designed for native-style applications in the browser where semantics don't really mean anything anyway. And like I said in my article, accessibility is taken care of.
The Web is HTML. HTTP is Hyper Text Transport Protocol. I think you're advocating for a JSTP that just cuts out HTML and CSS entirely. And at that point, why not just serve up compiled JS since it will be less bandwidth, right? Goodbye open web.
For compiling JS to be widely used, there has to be a decompiler or interpreter in most major browsers. It's no different than distributing binaries written in any compiled language.
While some of this is spot on, there's seems to be two threads to this that make less sense to me.
First, "building small things" isn't what many of us do from day to day. I don't think many of us sit down and try to create bloated, overly complex systems, but oversimplification isn't helpful either. If you're wild-westing it or reinventing wheels for your next web project, I can't help but think you've only got serious pain in your (near) future.
I think there's an important difference between complex and complicated. I wonder if you asked Neil about his set if he'd describe it more as an organized toolset that's evolved over time or a sprawling mess of a ball-and-chain he's involuntarily tied to.
I'm no fan of the verbose, Java-like implementations (ZF and SF, I'm looking at you) you've highlighted, but there are more options out there.
Secondly, I take issue with the abrasive tenor a lot of these posts seem to take. All critique and no solutions, especially no code to show for great ideas. While a good F@$* that S@#% helps everyone see the problem, the lack of action or offering of concrete ideas for improvement leaves me with the feeling that it's just complaining.
I wish more of the leadership in this community was contributing in an open-source, here's-the-code sort of way. At least contributing as much as they critique.
