[Seaside] A new critical blog discussing Seaside

[Keith Hodges]

Sebastian Sastre wrote:
> It will be easier for your ideas to be listened if put more effort in taking
> away bad emotions. Enphasis with a bit of drama could be ok to illustrate but
> nobody will have time to deal with your anger. Some things you wrote there do
> have sense so just manage to comunicate that in a positive way and see what
> happens. I don't mean less negative I mean positive. Otherwise you'll just help
> polluting the seaside ecosystem instead of making a better place. In short:
> after reading that I feel you are with focus in war instead of focusing in
> progress.
> And you did it annonymously, which leaves your ideas in a weaker position. What
> did you pretend with that? to create the annonymous seaside critic comunity?
> leaded by whom?
> don't misundertand me: I consider good critics as precious
> sebastian
>
>   
One of my fields of interest is emotional abuse.

When a person who points out a problem raises an issue, if the response
is to say that "the problem is theirs, that they have a problem", this
is abusive. So Lukas, calling him a "troll", is actually abusive. If you
want references to this principle I can provide them.

Mr Cucumber is raising issues. We need to identify the actual issues and
see if they need addressing. Turning around and shooting the messenger
is frequently used as the first line of defence so as not to actually
engage with any of the issues raised.

Secondly anger is a truth based emotion, it carries a valuable message,
unlike lie based emotions. Personally I dont see much anger in his blog,
I see honesty as expressed from his perception. In fact there is far
less anger expressed here than I would expect. I know I have been there,
and I am sorry to say that I agreed with most of the points raised, with
a couple of reservations.

I have had little or no contact with the 2.9 team, so I suspect/hope
that some of his criticisms may be over a year out of date.

Secondly I have come to the concusion that some of what might be
interpreted as arrogance is cultural. For example when handing out food
to the homeless, I always found that some foreigners would snatch the
food and scoff it without a word of a thank you. This to a conservative
English lad at the time was extremely rude. However a number of years
later I learned that for some cultures, the "thank you" IS the eagerness
to eat what is given.

It appears to me that Lukas, Phillippe and others, put defending the
code base first, rather than engaging with the person. This is the
cultural distinction, engineering vs human relations. These are two
separate fields, it is when they mix that we get problems. For human
relations we need a framework for harnessing peoples ideas and
contributions somewhere for them to go, some communication and assurance
that their work however small or incomplete is considered valuable.  We
need some form of buffer between the enthusiasm of contributors and the
code base. By establishing their bar of engineering excellence over the
code base, this is then mistaken for arrogance in the the human
relations field. Any contribution that cannot be expressed as a perfect
code contribution that applies to the existing code base is summarily
dismissed without comment. The result being that the enthusiam of
potential contributors is turned to exactly the opposite.

This is a valid issue which I am grateful to Mr Cucumber for raising,
because it happens to me frequently and as a result I made a conscious
decision not to bother even considering contributing back to the seaside
core again. For the same reason I will not contribute to Pharo, and I
think at least three times before I make any commit to Pier/Magritte.

For example, I have written a library which extends Magritte to support
Scriptaculous, so that fields may dynamically depend upon each other. So
my Magritte-Scriptaculous library has been sitting there for a long
time. I do wonder whether Lukas has ever looked at it, I know for
certain he has never contributed towards it. I have no idea of the value
of my contribution, I have no idea whether anyone is using it, and get
very little feedback as to whether it is any good or not. In short there
is no suggestion or clue available as to whether this contribution of my
time and effort is actually valuable to the community or not. It sits in
a contributions void, and gives no signals that would encourage me to
make further contributions. If at some point Lukas decides that he wants
dynamic support added to Magritte, I now fully expect him to write his
own, without even referring to mine. Is that arrogance? I don't know any
more, I have raised this issue ad infinitum on the Pharo list, and they
don't seem to think so.

If you make a contribution to Beach any contribution, I dont care how
small, how badly coded, how lacking in tests it is. I view your input as
valuable, and I welcome you to the team. I will join you in making your
work something of worth to the Beach community. I believe that there is
another way.

Keith

p.s. The issue of his being anonymous is also irrelevant to any actual
issues raised. There are many very good reasons for remaining anonymous
on the internet. When I find emails I have written dating back 15 years,
it makes me wish I was a bit more anonymous myself.