Comment by keithwhor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithwhor | Hacker News Reader

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I have made it my goal this year to be as positive and encouraging as possible.

... which is a bad sentence to begin with.

To the creator of this project: it is fantastic that you are thinking about abstractions at this level. You are fucking awesome. Keep it the hell up.

Real criticism: this microframework is obtuse with too much “magic”. First, $ is a symbol that most developers associate with jQuery. If your API isn’t jQuery compatible, _$ won’t save you.

Second — honestly, this is way too complicated. The _$ might be a contributing factor. I can’t understand or develop a cohesive internal framework for this Library from this documentation page. This might be a fault of the documentation, the abstractions, or both.

Keep iterating: it seems like you’re compiling views from data- attributes programmatically. Good call. I just can’t piece together why this is something I’d use and how the abstractions save me time versus any other framework.

constructive resolution tip: next time omit the info on the resolution

:). The very first thing I ever put on HN in Ruby got blasted — hard — for not having tests.

I never released OSS without tests again.

It’s hard to discern rigorous criticism from kneejerk reactionary responses. I’m hopeful that the narrative is helpful in showing I’m appreciative and impressed by the effort, but have real concerns about the project and implementation itself. It’s not bad. It’s difficult to understand. Which is a classification of software we’re all likely to create at some point, and we can all help each other be better at writing about what we create as well as building the right tools and abstractions.

constructive resolution tip tip: next time avoid criticizing the meta

It is jQuery compatible.

It feels like you are merely paying lip service to "being more positive" and generally biting at the bit to dig into the criticism. I somehow find this more way more irritating than the usual HN overly critical pedantry.

That’s fair — and I appreciate the criticism. Thank you. I don’t think it’s an entirely fair characterization and believe I was being earnest, but I understand why you feel that way.

Commenting (can no longer edit) to acknowledge I sort of contradicted myself. I meant it’s fair for you to feel that way, but I’m not sure the characterization is fair. Hope that makes sense.

I’m being pedantic about my own communication so you’re probably right that I’m pedantic in at least some sense ;).

The moment this landing page claimed its technology was indispensable was the same moment a sharp criticism was warranted.

The front-end landscape does not need another hegemonizing framework, particularly one with suspect motivations and even more suspect coding patterns.

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