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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

I didn't give that feedback to a contributor. I didn't encourage maintainers to insult contributors.

If you don't know what you're doing and you don't know that you don't know what you're doing, then yes it's likely what you produce will be both bug ridden and garbage.

It takes time and patience to refine it into something good. It doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

If you, or anyone else -- colleague, stranger, whatever -- submitted bug-ridden garbage, I'd spend time and energy to review your contribution, give you constructive feedback to the best of my ability, and hope for the best.

Hell, most _production_ software is bug-ridden garbage. I've written lots of bug-ridden garbage. I'm just calling a spade a spade.

If this turns you off contributing to open source, I don't know what to tell you. It's just reality.

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Describing some code as "bug-ridden garbage" betrays a negatively judgmental frame of mind, which will be visible in other ways and will turn some people away. It can help your outlook on the world and your impact on others to make an effort to think less negatively.

>Describing some code as "bug-ridden garbage" betrays a negatively judgmental frame of mind

Or an accurate depiction of reality.

> Describing some code as "bug-ridden garbage" betrays a negatively judgmental frame of mind

Far from it. In fact, the best thing about a correctness-oriented language like Rust is that you can immediately tell when stuff does not compute (the compiler will error out with a useful diagnostic, or else it will be in a small 'unsafe' block with easy to check safety conditions). Which makes it way easier to be less judgmental about all sorts of stuff.

This really describes quite well why Rust is such a joyful language to work in. You might still write garbage, but the compiler constrains the types of garbage you can write to a much smaller subset.

Whenever people say that a skillful programmer can write well-working C++, I don't disagree, but in my experience it continues to fail on projects with more people involved.

If your project has size N=1, and you're skillful it's not an issue, if you have N=2 or N=3, you might still be able to review everything and find very competent contributors.

But for bigger N, at some point you'll have average or below average skilled contributors in the project, you won't be able to review all contributions.

A strongly typed language, strict compiler, standard formatter, and standard linter however can scale in this way.

Rust offers all of these.

Sometimes honesty and truth can hurt. Sometimes you have to accept that and move on. Alternatively you can coddle people so that they think every thing that they do is wonderful and a gift to all of mankind. Or you can take offence at honest criticism everything and ... well here we are. Word policing, and overbearing nicety as form of karma currency are not good things. Adults sometimes call each other not nice names. The world is not a cosy blanket left in the sun covered with kittens.

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