I'll sue you if you use my common-sense JavaScript tests

http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev/msg/b8079000b547df15

by Rauchg • 17 years ago

84 78 17 years ago

groups.google.com

Rauchg• 17 years ago

Some other gems by David Mark

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_f...

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_t...

nzmsv• 17 years ago

Wow! After reading these, and the replies, I definitely agree with John Resig about that newsgroup: don't read. Or risk losing your hope for humanity.

jrockway• 17 years ago

It's sad that one person can destroy an entire community. But one can.

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

And yet I can't help drawing a parallel: comp.lang.lisp was famously full of the hateful spewing of an intolerant contributor, and for that both the group and the contributor (Erik Naggum) were basically worshipped by a non-trivial community. Why did Lisp produce that outcome, while JavaScript produces this?

iamwil2• 17 years ago

Reading that made me appreciate the discussions here a lot more.

NikkiA2• 17 years ago

Every Usenet programming language (and some that aren't PL related) community has a troll/kook like David. Over time you learn to read around them, or read them only for humour value.

webignition• 17 years ago

"Near as I can tell, [John Resig] has never written a competent script in his life (or written anything useful on the subject.)"

That's quite a brave statement from David Mark.

billybob2• 17 years ago

If Resig is incompetent, then 99.99% of Javascript coders should quit immediately. Maybe 100%.

axod2• 17 years ago

I think he has a few points. If you disagree with some of his points, argue why.

FWIW, I also view js libraries with skepticism. I'm not convinced they're a net gain for the web. (I'm talking about general purpose libs. UI libs obviously provide value).

There's this misconception that working with the DOM is hard, or can't be done in a cross browser way without bolting on a big js lib.

Even something as simple as a closure is routinely packaged up in a js lib as .bind() why??? Add to that the fact they usually do silly things like convert arguments to an Array etc just to slow you down some more.

When you see news stories like "js lib X latest release is 5 times as fast as previous version!" You should not think 'wow that's great'. You should think 'jesus christ how could they have written it so slow to start with? How do I know they've written it properly this time? Time to stop using js lib X'

mattmanser• 17 years ago

This just sounds like you haven't used jQuery yet. Then you'll know why.

mpk• 17 years ago

I actually had to go and google the person in question. After about five or so newsgroup messages from him badmouthing other people I gave up.

Still no idea who he is.

babyboy808• 17 years ago

Seems like this David Mark is mad at the world:

http://sixrevisions.com/javascript/promising_javascript_fram...

http://stackoverflow.com/users/88658/david-mark

http://help.wugnet.com/bravenet/webmaster/Great-Examples-cod...

jblochjohnson• 17 years ago

Thanks for digging these up. His tone and his arguments are two different things; I find his tone hard to take, but can any JS coders weigh in on his arguments?

boucher14• 17 years ago

His arguments are nonsensical. Are there bugs in jQuery? To be sure. But he has absolutely no clue what real developers are looking for in a library. Many of the complaints in his critiques center around the fact that jQuery does things which will break browsers like Netscape 4 and IE 5. Not only does jQuery not claim to support those browsers, there are literally no web developers using jQuery who care about support for those browsers.

thaumaturgy8• 17 years ago

shrug

There is some shred of validity to them.

However, most JS coders are too busy using jQuery or Prototype or something to Get Their Project Done and then move on to the next thing to be bothered by this guy.

pmichaud• 17 years ago

I remember reading one of his rants from a while back, and it actually caught me off guard. I know quite a bit about javascript, but the way he was talking made me think I was perhaps missing the boat. I looked into what he was saying, and some of it was sort of accurate, but not really relevant.

I think he just has angry-hyperactively-perfectionist-armchair-developer syndrome.

Case in point: where is his brilliant contribution to the JavaScript ecosystem?

yannis• 17 years ago

One of his quotes 'Every time a new browser version is released, anything built on them has to be re-tested due to an inexplicable reliance on the user agent string'.

Not really most libraries use feature testing, especially jQuery and John advocates feature testing in quite a few of his writings.

nl• 17 years ago

He's a perfect example of a troll: somewhat accurate, errors in the details. To explain them requires deep engagement in the argument - exactly what the troll wants.

The scary thing is that I don't think he actually is a troll. I could be wrong, though.

timdown2• 17 years ago

The good side of David Mark: I have read plenty of his stuff on comp.lang.javascript over some time, and my own JavaScript is good enough to tell that his understanding is deep and his code intelligent and thorough. I would say his knowledge of the DOM and how to code for it is significantly deeper than John Resig's, lending weight to his criticisms. He has been working on Dojo and I am certain his input will improve it significantly.

The bad side: he consistently antagonises people, has what seems to be a personal vendetta against jQuery and declines to publish useful, constructive critiques, instead posting ill-formatted, snide rants dressed up as code reviews on comp.lang.javascript. His behaviour towards John Resig has resulted in Resig claiming to have turned his back entirely on comp.lang.javascript, which is great shame because I think there is a lot he could learn there to improve jQuery. If David Mark's attacks are turning people away from comp.lang.javascript, then that is unfortunate because he is by no means the only expert on there and others experts on there will have less of an audience for their insightful posts.

iamwil2• 17 years ago

Blah. The last thing we want is to have more people reading his stuff, getting mad, and feeding the troll.

TNO• 17 years ago

Why is this even being posted to HN? Is it buzzword compliant or something?

yesimahuman• 17 years ago

Another reason not to participate in comp.lang.javascript: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn.

boucher14• 17 years ago

You are absolutely right.

chrischen3• 17 years ago

He (David Mark) isn't going to get much support with his attitude.

overgard• 17 years ago

I wish that were the case, but often it seems being controversial is a more direct path to popularity than thoughtfulness is.

thaumaturgy8• 17 years ago

He is not more popular than jQuery, however. (Or Resig for that matter.)

...Not that this should be reduced to a popularity contest.

tlrobinson• 17 years ago

Ah yes, David Mark. This guy trashes other JavaScript frameworks (usually quite pedantically) in order to promote his own "My Library". Not a good strategy if you ask me.

We were the target of a highly superficial "review" by him soon after Cappuccino was made public: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/msg/1799...

(for the record, YES and NO are there for compatibility with Objective-C, and we benchmarked the math functions, used in graphics routines which needed to be highly optimized, and found a significant performance improvement, in IE if I remember correctly, by aliasing them to eliminate the Math object property lookups)

boucher14• 17 years ago

Not to mention, in his "reviews" he consistently nitpicks on tiny things and then declares that no further effort could possibly even be warranted. Use a dollar sign anywhere in your code and David Mark will declare you an incompetent fool.

thaumaturgy8• 17 years ago

What's even more hilarious is the code in his "My Library".

I'm far too much of a generalist to consider myself a JavaScript expert. However, even I can pick out a number of items in his lib that shouldn't have been handled the way they are:

- He declares $ in a global context without first checking for its existence;

- He uses RegExp objects constantly -- in 50 different places in his full "mylib.js" -- including in cases where a simple indexOf would be better, and, best yet, he doesn't bother to cache them in any of the dozen or so cases that I examined. Wasn't that one of his criticisms of someone else's code?

- His treatment of camelCase is truly embarrassing, relying on an ugly RegExp every time it's called. Try something like this instead:

    _camelCases = {width:'width', height:'height'};
    _camelCaser = function (p) {
        return typeof _camelCases[p] != 'undefined' ? _camelCases[p] : _camelCases[p] = p.replace(/\-(.)/g, function(x, y){return y.toUpperCase()});
    }

There, now you only need to camelCase the property for anything once. JavaScript's object handling makes caching this kind of stuff soooo easy. And, if you do have to have a camelCasing function, try to do it with as little overhead as possible -- use the tools that JavaScript gives you, instead of capturing the string parts in a match and then .join()ing them and all that other nonsense.

His library doesn't demonstrate any of the kind of specialized language knowledge that he accuses other library developers of lacking, and it has at least some of the same weaknesses that he criticizes others' works for.

nostrademons3• 17 years ago

There's a tradeoff between download time and execution speed there, and download time usually wins. I wrote the camelCaser in Google Websearch (basing it off Closure), and I used a simple regexp without memoization. You can burn a lot of cycles in the time it takes to download a hundred bytes over 56.6k, and often a camelCaser is used in situations like an animation loop where speed doesn't matter as long as you come in under the frame rate.

julio_the_squid• 17 years ago

David Mark is an anti-jQuery crusader. He is known for speaking ill of people who use the library as well as the developers (John Resig in particular). He insists that jQuery is responsible for all of the sites across the internet that have JavaScript errors.

See http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7vul9/some_tech... http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8ndyw/jquerys_l...

tibbon• 17 years ago

What I don't understand is why he doesn't work to help jQuery to be better then and contribute a bit? If its causing errors and bugs then certainly he could help some instead of complaining?

Resig +1 Mark -1

chrischen3• 17 years ago

Ego?

furtivefelon• 17 years ago

I think this is "his" javascript library (can't find his name mentioned anywhere though): http://www.cinsoft.net/mylib.html

chrischen3• 17 years ago

It was in his stackoverflow profile right? So I guess it's a safe bet that it's his. Plus the description sounds like him.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

It is.

It's not all that usable ITRW.

jorsh2• 17 years ago

Dude has some decent points but has the chronic usenet disease of not being able to put them forth in any manner even approaching tact or class.

sh1mmer• 17 years ago

There is always some guy, I've never heard of, being an asshole on any given topic on the Internet. I'm sorry that he's picking on John/jQuery but it's really not that surprising.

I think John is being pretty pragmatic though just to exorcise the whole deal and attempt to enforce a clean room environment for the affected code branches.

jorsh2• 17 years ago

Here is the actual David Mark post in question: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/msg/071f...

kprobst• 17 years ago

Hmmm. There used to be a "David Mark" back in the day that trolled the Microsoft VB newsgroups when they were very active. Trolled hard. This guy's demeanor seems very similar.

stephenjudkins• 17 years ago

Everything I've read by this guy is more or less the same bilious, angry screed. His monomaniacal obsession with John Resig is a little alarming.

Therefore, I'm sad to admit that, in this case, he almost has a point. The use of attr('height') to mean not the height attribute in the DOM but as an alias for height() smells wrong to me. However, it's clear that he has absolutely no intention of becoming a productive contributor to jQuery or helping in any way.

By contrast, let's take a minute to appreciate this Matt Kruse fellow. He has apparently strong objections to something in jQuery's design and is taking it to John Resig. He seems ready to engage in a real dialogue. The end result? He probably ends up a little happier and jQuery ends up a little better.

The real question is: how can we have more Matt Kruses and fewer David Marks in the world? Do the David Marks of world drive off the Matt Kruses? (I think they almost certainly do.) Why are there so many sociopathic personalities in circles such as this, and how do we mitigate the damage they cause?

kroo• 17 years ago

In my experience perhaps the only way of dealing with characters like David Marks is by completely ignoring their contributions.

He does, I agree, almost have a point. However, his lack of respect for those who spend time and energy contributing to these projects could (and will likely) drive away many useful contributors. "Feeding the trolls" is a dangerous game, much more so than avoiding the advice of a few David Marks.

The problem with this strategy lies in the fact that most open-source projects are large, open communities, where experts in a particular area useful to that project are likely not to be ignored. John Resig's response to the situation (in which he condemns the entire comp.lang.javascript usenet group) seems an extreme (but perhaps appropriate) response to this -- he's sending a very strong message to those who contribute to jQuery: "no more feeding David Mark".

(I would also agree that this Matt Kruse fellow seems to be going about things in an excellent sort of way. His response to Resig < http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev/msg/e93f9484cd5246... > was, in my opinion, spot on)

compay• 17 years ago

The worst kind of trolls are the ones that are knowledgeable and articulate, but arrogant, dogmatic crusaders.

Many programming mailing lists I've been on ended up acquiring somebody like this, at which point I usually have to unsubscribe in order to resist the temptation to get into pointless flamewars.

pg• 17 years ago

Actually, the worst trolls are the ones that are knowledgeable and articulate, but are more dedicated to trolling than to any particular beliefs. Dogmatic trolls are at least somewhat constrained by their dogmas.

billybob2• 17 years ago

I'm completely unqualified to tell whether this guy has valid points. But Resig has led the charge on a Javascript library that makes my job dramatically easier and more fun. To gain the respect I have for Resig, Mr. Mark would have to do likewise, or contribute significantly to jQuery.

Or, to put it in more childish terms, "if you're so smart, let's see you do it."

boucher14• 17 years ago

His latest, on a bug report I filed against google closure: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_t...

I'd like to see him write cross browser key-event handling code without doing UA sniffing. Honestly, I would like that. He committed an attempt to a branch of Dojo but it's not in service and doesn't actually work.

cloverfield3• 17 years ago

And you don't know what you are talking about either. To save time, responses are aggregated here:-

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.javascript/browse_t...

boucher14• 17 years ago

His response is typical. He denies saying things which can easily be disproved. He makes basic factual errors and in the same sentence validates most of the criticism in this thread:

"Cappuccino. That's something built on top of Sproutcore, right? No need to get any deeper than that."

Of course, Cappuccino isn't built on Sproutcore, but even if it was this sentence illustrates the fact that David has long ago made decisions about what he perceives to be the state of javascript frameworks, and isn't interested in anything other than those opinions, however baseless those opinions may be.

Sensible4• 17 years ago

It would be useful that instead of praising one person and denegrating another, supporters of jquery, capucinno et al addressed each of the many concerns that have been raised about those libraries in a manner that can be objectively evaluate.

boucher14• 17 years ago

It's difficult to have a rational discussion with someone who has already staked out an extreme position and offered little to no evidence to support that opinion.

Also, it's spelled Cappuccino. And since David's superficial review contained virtually nothing of substance, there isn't much to objectively respond to.

Example:

           <script src = "Frameworks/Objective-J/ObjectiveJ.js" type = "text/javascript"></script>

     > Nice markup.

Yes, one file in 280 Slides (not Cappuccino) has spaces between the attribute, equals sign, and quote. We must be incompetent.

    > Yeah, I guess "false" is harder on the fingers.

Or, maybe, we're going for an easier transition for people from an Objective-C background...

    with (new prototype_bug()) 
        member = true; 

    > Ugh.

How insightful. Hilariously enough, this is actually doing real feature detection to detect a real bug in real browsers.

    > I've seen enough.

So, in other words, he made no substantive evaluation. If you ask us questions, and aren't a dick about it, we're more than happy to give answers. We readily admit our own faults, and we're vocal about what our framework is not designed to do.

Sensible4• 17 years ago

Your post reads like an attack on a person rather than anything else. I've read tons of posts by David Mark and I've found little wrong with them technically so describe his position as extreme does not mean he is automatically wrong on everything.

Why pull things out of context and not provide a reference to the original?

You complain about the tone of his posts (someone called it snarky) and then go on to post your own snarky comments, why?

I'll sue you if you use my common-sense JavaScript tests

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