2013-3-30
Some recent activity from active contributors regarding ES6 proposals threaten to undermine its acceptance from the community at large.
ES6 proposals include the fat arrow, destructured assignment, splat args, let/block scope, class syntax, class-based inheritance, setters/getters with export, the module loader syntax, weak maps, weak events, @symbols, and so forth.
That is a lot for a community user of the language to comprehend. It is a lot for a single iteration of any project.
The sheer amount of change is at root of the confusion apparent even among the es-discuss mailing list ~ [see this conversation for an example] (https://twitter.com/kangax/status/315863525899780096 ""that was removed from the spec", "I thought it was back in", "it's on the table", "'on the table' does not mean 'in the spec'"").
But belligerent comtempt is over the line, exemplified by an unapologetic individual in response to a skeptical post from an actual user of JavaScript. Also troubling, a fairly prominent JS community member from Google saw nothing wrong with this.
That kind of public shaming from any involved contributor is unacceptable. It's not merely rude, it discourages other actual users of the language from raising questions and objections.
You have a public duty as a subject matter expert to be charitable toward any non-expert who takes the time to communicate with you, however imperfectly or inarticulately.
The longer this behavior goes unaddressed, the more it undoes whatever good will remains.
Hi @dfkaye!
I wanted to reach out to you and let you know that I've removed any harsh language from the gist you linked to above. The corrections remain the same, as it's very important to me that the JavaScript community (that I hold dear) is provided with the correct information. It's also important to me that you know I'm not a bully and I wasn't picking on Peter—I've always seen him as a thought leader in the JS community and I found it irresponsible of him to produce such a misinformed blog post. It was very shocking to me, considering his participation on the es-discuss mailing list.
Anyway, I'd like to think I'm actually a nice guy, so if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ping me on IRC: rwaldron or email me: waldron.rick@gmail.com and I would be happy to answer any questions or hear any criticism directly.
Have a great day!
Rick