I take my hat off to all current, previous and prospective OS
developers.
Clearly without the collective input and ideas this developer
community
contributes to projects such as Velocity, software development as a
respected profession will struggle to earn a reputation as an
innovative
vehicle which drives results.
I joined this mailing list in the hope I would gain access to a bank
of
experienced developers by which of course I could draw on and
develop my own
skills and techniques. After reading these posts, I am not convinced
these
mailing lists are an appropriate tool which facilitates active and
constructive participation. I will not be recommending this to my
professional colleagues within the industry.
Many Thanks
Steven Yates
-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Dekany [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, 10 March 2008 3:51 PM
To: Velocity Developers List
Subject: Re: Call a velocity macro
:D Hilarious! I mean, everybody knows Jonathan is an ass hole for his
doing this aggressive "advertising" here, and I told him back then for
several occasions to stop it (I'm a FreeMarker contributor... coming
from the side of the SATAN <grunting/>, you know), but what he brings
out of you guys worths all the face loss of the FM project. :) I
understand that ass licking and being Politically Correct and things
like that are very important for being "professional", means, for a
good career. I can handle that, life is that disgusting and cruel,
etc... I shut my trap at may employees as well, and of course I LOVE
THEM ;), who ever they are. If they think that brings them the income,
so be it. But, sometimes I have the feeling that some of you are not
just pretending these things for practical considerations, but you
indeed think it seriously! And that's creepy. Since when should people
respect things that are bad, and since when it's not professional to
call the sh*t to what it is? Especially in private??? Come on! I have
to puke from all of this liberal bullshit when someone honestly
believes these. How can someone be such a... eh. And then you felt you
have to report it on the list, or what was that??? And then... this
"When Nathan Bubna wrote me"... I know it's not the same case, but I
can't help but remember when on another ASF list I was critical about
a certain technical aspect of a project, in a *professional* but
surely firm way, and another user started to discuss the stuff with me
as opposed to trying to gently ridicule the issue. And later he wrote
me in private, that he wont continue, because his employer, whose
company was connected with some key personal at the ASF project, was
told him that, well, it was a wrong thing that he has talked to me. He
was almost angry with me because I got him into trouble. God... You
see, poor guy was all time there on the list, but he didn't realize I
was internally declared to be persona non garta (it seems...), and he
talked to me! What a mistake! :)
Monday, March 10, 2008, 3:46:39 AM, Adrian Tarau wrote:
Jonathan,
I must confess you are above my expectations/past experiences. When
I post your "nice words" on the mailing list(development list by the
way) I didn't knew who you are. I thought you are just a regular
user(or even a FreeMarker commiter) who is way to passionate about
FreeMarker and tries to trash the Velocity name just because he had
a bad
experience with Velocity.
When Nathan Bubna wrote me and told me who you are, I realized I
just started some old war between Velocity and FreeMarker(after I
read some of your old posts).So there was not my intention to trash
the FreeMarker lead developer name because *I didn't knew who you
are*.
World like "dipshit", "despicable", don't sit very well near "lead
developer" or even "software engineer". I would expect something
like this in a bar, but not on a mailing list.
Reading your last post, I realized you don't get it and probably
you don't understand the concept. !!!IT'S ALL ABOUT RESPECT!!!.
I don't care how many bad designs or weak points has Velocity, you
should treat the Velocity community, the current developers, past
and current owners with RESPECT. Jonathan , there are other ways to
bring new users to FreeMarker...your way is completely wrong.
You, as a (past) Velocity user are entitled to wrote about your bad
experiences with Velocity and thanks to the current search engines
your words will be "visible" in the first 100 results in any search
engine. If the Velocity developers won't take action to improve the
engine and all those bad experiences will pile up, Velocity will die
by itself, you don't need to help it. Or you could help, but do it
in a
different way.
Try to get this and you will sleep better.
-----Original Message-----
From: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jonathan Revusky
Sent: Sunday, March 09, 2008 1:21 PM
To: dev@velocity.apache.org
Subject: Re: Call a velocity macro
Adrian Tarau wrote:
Jonathan,
Basic common sense? Based on your long posts on Velocity forum, I
think I
can ask you if you have some common sense.
Adrian, you little dipshit, whatever long posts I wrote on this forum
were responses to other public posts on the forum. I wrote you a
note in
private and you responded on the public forum. That is the
violation of
nettiquette I am referring to. If you don't understand that you are
not
supposed to do that, as I said before, you don't understand much.
Well, it's not just that, Adrian. You're such a despicable
hypocrite. I
mean, why did you respond in public to a private note? Obviously to
try
to goad me into starting some kind of flame war or whatever. You
try to
goad somebody into responding and then you say "tsk tsk, look what
a bad
guy you are".
Typical stuff, but it's pathetic. I mean, you're pathetic, Adrian.
If you really think Velocity is a dinosaur, you could let him
die(with
some respect if you say it meant something 7 years ago).
7 years ago (maybe closer to 8 years ago) Velocity was written by Jon
"Monkey see, Monkey do" Stevens as a copycat clone of an existing
open
source project called WebMacro. It was such a mindless copycat job
that
he even copied some rather strange limitations of WebMacro. One such
thing was that WebMacro had no support for decimal numbers, only
integers, probably because the original author had not got round to
implementing it. You know, really, it's just like a dim student who
copies another student's exam answers word for word, including the
spelling mistakes.
The really humorous thing about this is that, at a later stage, when
people showed up who obviously needed decimal numbers, Velocity
maintainers (rather than just implementing decimal number support)
spent
all kinds of energy arguing that the lack of decimal numbers in
Velocity
was the result of some kind of profound philosophical thinking on
their
part,.. yeah, like they'd really thought about it and decided that
integers were good, but decimal numbers bad. Of course, everybody who
knew the history of the project knew that Velocity lacked decimal
number
support because it was a mindless copy of Webmacro, which in turn
lacked
decimal number support.
In any case, do you think that's really a very nice thing to do? You
write a mindless copy of somebody else's work and then you use the
apache.org projection to eclipse the original pioneering work? It's
the
kind of thing Microsoft historically does, but at least that's to
make
money, so it makes sense. The origins of the Velocity project
really are
in behavior that is somewhat pathological.
I mean, how would you feel about this if you were the original
author of
WebMacro? It's really not very nice. These really aren't very nice
people.
Now, to be fair, all the original authors of Velocity, anybody who
designed or implemented any significant part of the codebase, are
long
gone. What you have now is a set of poeple who have taken on the
role of
being "owners" of the project, because it's some kind of feather in
their cap or something. But really, if you really look at it, what
they're doing is totally masturbatory, putting out infinitesimal
incremental releases of a product that is 6 years behind the state of
the art in its space.
And again, aside from being rather pathetic, is that really a very
nice
thing to be doing? I mean, the problem is that a lot of people in
this
field are pressed for time and cannot evaluate everything properly,
so
many people see something is on apache.org, and they reason, okay,
I'm
using the Apache Web Server, or I'm using tomcat, so it makes sense
to
use the templating engine that comes from apache. So this, and
basically
anything on apache.org, gets a level of attention and usage totally
out
of proportion to its technical merit. So, you can see why people
would
end up thinking that Velocity is a reasonable option and use it.
The problem is, of course, that, eventually many people end up
realizing
waht's up with this. Consider what Max Andersen is saying in this
blog
entry: http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/
AStoryAboutFreeMarkerAndVelocity
Here is a quote:
"The choice originally fell on Velocity since it was the biggest
player
around, and I added it naively thinking that the error and log
handling
could not be that bad if so many people were using it and if there
were
an issue it would be fixed soon. As time went by I learned that it
was
definitely not the case."
He's openly saying that he didn't research the alternatives,
because it
was highly visible and he figured it couldn't be that bad (though he
later learns it is... :-)) Basically he's saying in code: "Jeez they
tricked me, I thought this was something fairly up to date that was
being properly maintained, but it's not. Don't be tricked."
If you think FreeMarker is the brightest start above the horizon,
Look, it's quite normal that I and my collaborators would take
pride in
our work. That's par for the course. What my blog entry I pointed to
clearly documents is just how frequent it is that people start using
Velocity, find it insufficient, and later migrate to FreeMarker. I
pointed out that some of the most visible projects in the java
world did
this: Netbeans, Hibernate, Webwork/Struts 2. They all had significant
investments in using Velocity for templating, and later switched to
FreeMarker. That's what I'm saying here:
http://freemarker.blogspot.com/2007/12/velocity-of-freemarker-looking-at-5.h
tml
I'm not saying "In my opinion, FreeMarker is great". I am saying that
the people behind these projects I mention, surely some of them among
the most talented java programmers around, did this Velocity to
FreeMarker migration. That's the point being made. If you're going to
respond to something, answer what the person is actually saying.
Of course, you don't have to trust the developers of Hibernate,
Netbeans, or Struts 2, you could do your own evaluation and come back
and tell people what you found out. That would be a much better use
of
your time than pathetically trying to flame me resorting to this
kind of
straw-man argumentation.
you should let the users to discover FreeMarker by themselves.
Well, that's an absurd statement in this context, because really,
it's
pretty obvious that Velocity, like Struts 1.x and other obsolete
things,
still has a large user base because of the visibility advantage that
these apache projects have. If somebody in my position is going to
create a better alternative, and just passively wait for people to
find
out about it, that is rather ridiculous. I tend to think that we
don't
do enough publicity for the project, but that's the way it goes, In
the
time I have to spend on the project, I prefer to hack code rather
than
write public relations stuff. And my collaborators are the same, no
doubt.
If there is somebody out there looking for a template engine and
he's
going to stop to Velocity without evaluation other projects, it's
his fault
Yes, it is his responsibility ultimately. However, much of the
problem
is that people don't have the time to evaluate everything properly,
and
often just choose the thing that's most visible in its space. Clearly
that's what Max Andersen (to his later regret) did. Obviously, the
people in all those projects I mentioned that switched to FreeMarker
after using Velocity extensively for some time, if they had the
decision
to make over again, would have just used FreeMarker from the very
start,
since that would have saved them all transition costs, and they'd
have
been using the more capable tool from the start.
Yes, ultimately the developer is responsible for his or her choice of
tools. However, when you're pushing something that's obsolete, and
leveraging this apache effect to do so, you're increasing the
probability that people will opt for that.... I mean, it's not a very
nice thing to do. These aren't very nice people.
if fails(if he finally realized Velocity doesn't have all the
features
he needs). It's his bad, not because Velocity is a *junk*, is just
because he didn't took some time to evaluate at least 2 projects.
Even
if you fail to choose the right project(the reason doesn't matter),
it
is still useful for you, everybody learns from mistakes. Even with
Velocity, most of the problems will be on your project side. Those
missing feature will not block you form releasing your project, I can
tell you that.
That you can do a lot of useful work with something that is
obsolete is
not at issue. One could dust off that 386 in the cellar and fire it
up
and run some old wordperfect and lotus 1-2-3 and do a lot of useful
work. The central point is whether people should be pushing something
that is technically obsolete, as if it was state of the art. I submit
that that is unethical and really, quite simply not a very nice
thing to
do.
Now, I was going to ignore your silly attempt to goad me by
responding
to a private message on a public forum. What finally got my goat, I
think, was when Nathan Bubna referred to the proposed blockmacro
feature
as an "an exciting new idea" or something like that. I mean, that
kind
of thing just gets to be too much. I think JSP 2.x has had that for
years too.
If you search after "java template engine" in Google, you'll find
Velocity and FreeMarker, so it would be really hard to miss
FreeMarker and
choose Velocity(if you're afraid of that). Some people could use
Velocity
even if it lacks some features just because of the syntax, or just
some
other "stupid" reasons.
This is not about coding style, features and not even
performance(even if
it is an important aspect). Even if you do a code review, some
similar rules
applies : review the code and not the person(project), ask for the
reason
why the code is as it is, ask before accuse, etc, etc.
What are you talking about?
I'm not going to continue arguing with you why you shouldn't
behave like
this, I think if you didn't got it until now it is too late to try
now. I
will not be one who will "turn you to the light" :), that's my
personal
feeling. My personal advice is let the community to grow around you
and let
others live with their projects. In the end, everybody will win.
No, Adrian, everybody wins when the things being offered are all
approximately state of the art. When you have people pushing
something
obsolete, at least some people lose. They waste valuable developer
time
with things that they shouldn't have wasted time with. That was
pretty
clearly what happened in Max Andersen's "Story about FreeMarker and
Velocity"
(http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/AStoryAboutFreeMarkerAndVelocity )
Not
only did Max lose a lot of time with Velocity, the users of his
HIbernate Tools project clearly did.
The basic logical fallacy you're engaging in is the idea that all
choices are valid. I walk into the local bakery and they've got all
kinds of bread, right? They've got french bread, german style dark
bread, sourdough, rye.... I have choice and they're all valid
choices.
Yeah, that's a lot better for the consumer than only having one
kind of
bread.
BUT THAT'S ONLY IF THE BREAD IS ALL FRESH!!!
If the only freshly baked bread there is the rye bread, say, and the
other choices are all several days old and stale and hard, then my
ability to choose among different kinds of bread offers no extra
value.
Obviously, because there is only one kind of bread that is fresh. In
fact, in this scenario of choices, the consumer would clearly be
better
off if the bakery only offered that one kind of bread, because then
the
he could not ever purchase the stale bread by accident. And of
course,
that becomes increasingly likely when the stale bread is displayed
prominently as if it was fresh.
And what's the difference between that and Nathan Bubna gushing about
exciting new ideas that have existed in competing products for 5
years
or more? I mean, encouraging people to be so misguided about what the
state of the art in the space is, it just leads people to waste their
time.
The guy who started the original discussion (this time round, it's
come
up at least a few times before, but nothing was ever done) I wrote
that
guy a note in private (to which he did NOT respond in public, of
course)
and a while later, I have some further correspondence with him and
he is
now using FreeMarker. Just an example. Rational, pragmatic people
have
no particular interest in wasting their time. He sees that another
project already has the features in mature form that he was
starting to
implement in Velocity, and bango, he just switches to that.
Best wishes,
Adrian Tarau.
PS. It was not my intention to reveal your private message, it was
more
an "automatic" reaction to the words "project", "junk",
You're lying, Adrian. It's was not an "automatic" reaction. An
automatic
reaction would involve hitting reply-to and it would go back to me.
You
quite consciously changed to the destination address so that it
would go
to the public forum.
"mine is better" based on my personal experience. My apologies to
you.
I don't think I can accept the apology. I don't think I can accept an
apology that (a) contains an obvious lie and (b) is in a message
that is
such a self-righteous lecturing tone.
Feel free to write a proper apology when you've cooled off.
Jonathan Revusky
--
Best regards,
Daniel Dekany
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