Rookies in the Bike Shed

Re:Rookies in the Bike Shed by chc on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @04:07PM (#3763361)

That is true, and I'm sorry if it sounded that way. I was speaking from the perspective of interacting with other people, not your inner thoughts. You might actually have had very good reasons why your choice was superior, but you did not share them with anyone else, and from an impartial observer's perspective, it looks like this stonewalling is what made a simple PR turn into a huge bikeshedding flamefest. If this doesn't matter to you, I apologize for wasting your time. It just seemed like something I would want to hear if I were in your place.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rookies in the Bike Shed by fxn on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @04:46PM (#3763496)

If that was the intention I appreciate it.

Yes it matters to me, but up to a point. I cannot do things in my life seeking approval or saying yes to some people when I am convinced the answer is no.

Also, saying no, and not applying the PR the way I did, with the rationales and respect I showed, should not be taken as an offense. People just get upset when they see the red label "Closed".

On the other hand, for every 24 haters, I can present 24 lovers. It just doesn't matter, one has to do what he thinks is the correct action. Do it politely, but do it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Rookies in the Bike Shed by bratsche on Tuesday March 27, 2012 @10:59PM (#3764522)

It's more than that though. It seemed really clear that a lot of people thought this was useful, and you blew off all objections without really explaining sufficiently why. It's not that big of a deal, and it sucks that everyone wasted so much time on it, but the thing that bothers me about it is that I (and it sounds like a number of other people) have come away from this still not understanding why the change is rejected. We understand what you wrote about predicates not guaranteeing a boolean, but your attitude kind of implied that predicates should not return a boolean and, clearly, a number of people don't understand why that makes sense.

What you failed to address was why your way was better than returning a boolean true/false. Everyone understood your comments that predicates don't necessarily need to return those, but your comments kind of read like "my way is perfectly valid Ruby" while the other people's perspective seemed to be "our way is perfectly valid Ruby also, and it alleviates some potential annoyances or pitfalls". You never really addressed any of that, it always seemed to just go back to "my way is valid Ruby".

Maybe this wasn't really your intention, but it honestly seemed as though you were deliberately trying to frustrate people. I think that's why there was so much push-back (in the form of about three other PRs being opened). Not because people felt so strongly about xhr?, but because it just seemed like you were just rejecting everyone's opinions without really expressing why returning true/false is worse than returning 0/nil.

I'm basically a total outsider since I haven't contributed to Rails yet, so feel free to completely ignore my perspective.

[ Parent | on HN ]