Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

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Advice for the future: experiments should be explicitly tagged as such. The commit message "docs: add Phase-A porting guide" says nothing about the experimental and looks like a planned move to rust. That message certainly looks very official to me.

> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.

Trying to pass off a blunder like this like its no big deal is an insult to your users. You made a dumb mistake. Own it, be transparent and correct the problem that started this; namely, put some form of experimental tag in the commit message. Then say you made a simple mistake, sorry, and move on. Being dismissive is a defense mechanism that can arouse suspicion, as in are you now lying about the experimental state to quench the flame war? Not that I believe that but it can certainly now become conspiracy. Again, you can avoid all that with transparency.

Or the community at large could stop acting deranged over language wars like it’s 2001.

It’s their repo, let them do what they want lol

I didn't get the impression that anyone cares about the source or destination language. I think the concern is centered around the long history of failure with large scale rewrites like this-- See Netscape 5, Perl 5, etc. Joel Spolsky wrote a legendary article about this [0]. I think the NextJS app router might be slowly joining this conversation as well.

It could get even worse if they get Second System Syndrome[1] and try to add features as they rewrite it. Considering Bun's rapid development cycle, this seems likely.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

Or we can stop being toxic to open source maintainers and acting like we own them or they owe us anything.

A commit message on a random branch is not an obligation. Not telling random internet users what side projects they're working on is not a blunder. It quite frankly doesn't matter what you think looks official, it doesn't give you the right to treat people like this.

It's so embarrassing to be a programmer some times, so many of my peers behaving like spoiled rotten brats.

> Or we can stop being toxic to open source maintainers and acting like we own them or they owe us anything.

The majority of the community feels this way which says something. The author's reaction is to publicly display being upset and dismissive of the communities reaction. That is just making it worse.

When you work on a project this big, more care is needed. The commit was an innocent mistake. The blunder is blowing off the communities response as overblown which it would be had the commit been tagged experimental. But it wasn't. And the author did themselves no favor blowing it off.

If the author was smart, their reply would simply have been:

Hello, To clarify, this is an experimental branch only. There are no plans to port, only experiment. I will tag the repo as such to ensure people understand its intention and avoid future misunderstandings.

Nothing difficult to understand here.

> The majority of the community feels this way which says something.

Yes, it says that those people are spoiled rotten brats and the community needs to start calling it out to improve itself.

They aren't contributors. They aren't employees. They aren't paying customers. Bun is not a web standard. They benefit from a free product that they chose to opt into over the standard ecosystem.

And for some reason they feel they have a right to know every decision and experiment everyone who does work on that project is making apriori. And, God forbid, if somebody even so much as starts working on something in an off branch that doesn't affect them in any way without getting their approval, they're going throw an absolute hissy fit.

And to criticize the person actually doing their job for feeling slighted that hundreds of people have verbally accosted them over it, because one feels they don't recognize an "implied responsibility" to those folk, is silly.

I'll also push back, though. The majority of the community doesn't seem to be doing anything.

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