“I’m having trouble with something”
You: [citation needed]
Excellent work, such passion for the community! I bet you can think back to when people weren’t so dismissive of your obstacles when you were learning something. The pursuit of knowledge should never meet cruelty.
I think you are misunderstanding. The comment you quote is proably related to “this is not actually a good OOP practice” which is a statement that could be argued about.
Your slogan on your profile which is “keepin’ it toxic” seems relevant here.
You will NEVER see me harassing a new user for not understanding something, never in your life.
To be completely honest, I can’t think of a more despicable thing to do. I can get down with some Emacs/Vim flame wars because it’s fun, but I wouldn’t sink to the level of picking on someone engaging in the most noble pursuit of them all.
It’s just bad business. You might not realize that Julia is developing a reputation outside of the community for being incredibly toxic (not the same as my toxic) and coarse towards new users. I messaged Stefan directly but I should guess he will not respond as this is not his first time being seen roughing up new users.
Julia is one of the most technically impressive programming languages in the past 20 years, we can’t afford to be running new users off.
Stefan was not harassing the new user for not understanding something. But the quoted sentence implied that a common and ideomatic julia practice is not “good practice”. That’s a fairly critical claim that should be backed up by a citation.
In this case in particular it seemed to imply that inheritance is better than composition - a highly debatable claim.
Not even close. He explained he’s coming from Java, provided plenty of information about his question and made clear which part he didn’t understand.
If Stefan had wanted to debate that claim, he wouldn’t have been completely dismissive and “[citation needed]” the guy in the first place.
Obviously composition makes a bit more sense with Julia types, but if you were a Java programmer learning Julia, it’s obviously a point of confusion because it is counter-intuitive to someone with Java experience and no Julia experience.
Edit: I won’t be replying further to this thread as I think it does not belong in this section.
I’ll give one last reply then, just to state that if you read the thread the OP actually got good help and was directed towards some very high-quality advice for solving his problem.
I don’t think that Julia is toxic to newcomers at all, quite on the contrary. But I will agree that there is an oversensitivity towards a certain group of newcomers - the newcomers that say “Julia is different from programming language X, which I am used to; therefore Julia is wrong and should be changed” (mark that I am not implying that the OP is such a newcomer in any way! I am only talking about the Julia community).
This kind of newcomer will often meet resistance, unless they back up their claims with good documentation, or preferably even well-researched pull requests on the main language (of course newcomers don’t do that).
On the path to knowledge, you should never meet cruelty. But on that path you will at times meet people who question your claims, or ask that you document them.
He said it’s not good OOP practice (referring to his background with OOP, and asking for the Julian way of doing it), which may or may not be correct, I don’t know.
I have said similar things quite a few times. “This isn’t really idiomatic Julia”, “In Julia this is considered an implementation detail, and it is good practice to…”, etc. etc. No-one has demanded a cite. I think it’s pretty common to make claims similar to the OP based on experience and impressions, even if one is sometimes wrong.
The reply certainly was not harassment, but still pretty jarring.
OK, fair enough.
I work in academia where such a statement is completely normal; but of course people with different backgrounds are likely to perceive it differently. Good to keep in mind.
Your [sorry: the OPs] claim was that putting a certain data into each composite type that inherited from an abstract type was not good OOP practice. I think it was quite reasonable to point out that if you make such a claim you should supported with a citation. It is not at all obvious that it is true!
No need to get upset. As you will find, the developers of Julia are an extremely helpful bunch. They often go out of their way to help you out, but it is hard to constructively address OPINIONS rather than FACTS.
I have a similar background, and there’s nothing wrong with asking for a cite.
But even in academia, you wouldn’t sneak up on a new colleague on his first day on the job, and call “Citation!” without as much as a how-do-you-do, just because he asked a technically misguided question. Normally, you have a bit of polite chit-chat, clarifying your positions, then you ask for citations. Some people are just a bit more to the point.
(Sorry for going on about this, btw. I just think this is a matter of tone and timing, not content.)
I’m pretty sure the “[citation need]” was just a funny (as in a joke) way of saying “what you said is debatable. I see it in another way…” rather than literally asking for a citation.
Precise communication without the clues given by body language is hard!
Anyway, I don’t mean to continue the derailed argument.
I’ve split this discussion of tone from the main beginner’s thread — there’s some great content there that was being obscured. I’d like to remind all involved that our boards’ FAQ explicitly discourages sidetracking discussions by talking about the tone of a certain message. We have private messages and flags that can be used to address those concerns.
And as @favba notes — let’s be a little more charitable in our reading of others’ posts.
Sorry for sidetracking the thread.
I’m sorry the tone of my comment did not come across as intended – it was a joke, as explained by @favba:
I guess we’ve reached a point on Julia forums where I can no longer afford any subtle humor, as nothing I do comes across as subtle. This particular point (whether copying fields is morally reprehensible or is merely tedious) has been debated ad nauseum, e.g. in #4935, #7442, #6975, #19383. In these discussions, people make lots of claims about what is or is not good object-oriented practice. These claims are often quite debatable and subjective. I merely wanted to point out – without debating the subject yet again – that claiming that something is good or bad OOP practice is usually a danger sign that one has gotten away from thinking about why something is actually good or bad. If something is bad, why is it bad?
More importantly, I want to apologize to @ogreyesp for accidentally derailing his thread and for any offense or confusion I may have caused him or anyone else.