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Why none of your opinions matter.

1 points by justinbaker ↗ HN
I see so many articles criticizing certain libraries, development patterns, frameworks, or languages as a whole. These trash talking posts usually reflect the ideas of a portion of a community, or a single person. The recent posts clamoring over the recent changes in Rails, or "Why ____ sucks", or "Why ___________ is wrong" seem to be made by people who don't understand the complex reasoning for these things. Can't these guys just leave people alone and let them use whatever makes them happy?

1 comment

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arctangent
I'm sure that the community at large appreciates people who make stuff instead of watching TV or wasting their lives away in their nearest bar. Whether we like or dislike something says nothing about the respect we have for people who make things.

However, the tech sector is (mostly) meritocratic and we don't have much room for things which don't work properly. We always want to make them work better. Criticism tends to be meant in good spirits and it's expected that people will take criticism well (rather than personally).

I take your point about ill-informed criticism. The proper thing to do in that case is to politely explain why the person criticising is wrong. It may be that a seemingly crazy idea makes good sense in the context of a particular framework once you are familiar enough with that framework to exploit the particular subtlety being discussed.

The onus is on you to educate others - scepticism should be expected as the default response. Without having used the technology, a person can't be expected to "understand the complex reasoning for these things".