There's another thread right now on HN's front end asking about online toxicity. Since you've decided to openly mock this project and it's maintainers, I've decided it's fair to remind you about your humanity.
Why do projects insist on labeling themselves as "for humans"? That makes no sense!
Libraries have historically been terse and hard to understand. It's why stackoverflow exists. It allows those with more experience help others.
Labeling a library as "for humans" means that special consideration was made to make it easier to grasp. That might hide some of the complexity. It could also limit the scope of the library's abilities. But it puts people and the UX first.
Is this the correct approach? We should have simple and complex libraries. For every "for humans" library there should be a more complex one. And vice versa.
Be human. Emphatic. Quick to praise. Slow to condem. Imagine it was you announcing a similar library. How would you feel to be openly ridiculed in such forum?
I didn't ridicule anyone. I did criticize what I see as an obnoxious trend in software labeling and I stand by that. But if you re-read my post, I didn't say one thing bad about the project itself, and didn't mention the author at all. My comment was entirely scoped to the "for humans" description.
I emphatically insist that it's absolutely OK to lambast industry trends, and that's what I did here. I'm not sure how you inferred ridicule from that.
I think to most reasonable readers of your text, the "it" that you reference multiple times isn't particularly clear (do you mean: it = the trend, it = the project, it = the maintainers?), and also you literally said it "shows a kind of naivete."
Shows naivete on the part of what/who? Surely a trend cannot be naive on its own, so any reasonable reading of this sentence means that you are calling the project and/or maintainer naive. How is that not (a mild form of) ridicule?
I'll be honest: it feels to me here that you really want to find bad intentions in my post. Well, there weren't any. But yes, since you brought it up, I do think it shows a little naivete on the part of authors who label their projects "for humans" unless they can make a very strong case for why they're abstracting away the details that other projects require. One possibility is that previous projects have been needlessly complicated (in which case I honestly see "for humans" as kind of an insult to those projects, as though they weren't for humans). Another is that the author doesn't understand why those projects are more complex, which means that new users are about to learn some interesting lessons about leaky abstractions.
But more fundamentally, I'm not sure you noticed that the project's author was the one who wrote this post. The reason you do that on Hacker News is to demonstrate something you've been working on to get community feedback. Sometimes that feedback may be unpleasant, but as long as it was delivered with good intentions (as mine was), that's absolutely crucial. If OP thought they were going to get nothing but positive "this is the greatest thing ever!" replies, then that would be a radically higher level of naivete than anything I said would have implied. I don't think that's the case.
I know I'm not the only person who feels this way about "for humans". Any time the subject comes up, lots - by my estimation the majority - of opinions lean the same way. This project is still very new. Is it kinder to say something up front to let them know they may be turning away potential users, or to not say a word and maybe see the project gain less popularity than it might otherwise deserve? Again, nothing I said was insulting.
And more to the point, it was sincere. The author was implicitly asking for sincere feedback about their project, and I gave it. You said I've ridiculed them, but note that they haven't piped up to agree with you. I kind of think you're offended on the behalf of someone who isn't.
(And OP, if you're reading this, nothing I said was intended as an insult. But really, drop the "for humans". It's not a good look.)
Why do projects insist on labeling themselves as "for humans"? That makes no sense!
Libraries have historically been terse and hard to understand. It's why stackoverflow exists. It allows those with more experience help others.
Labeling a library as "for humans" means that special consideration was made to make it easier to grasp. That might hide some of the complexity. It could also limit the scope of the library's abilities. But it puts people and the UX first.
Is this the correct approach? We should have simple and complex libraries. For every "for humans" library there should be a more complex one. And vice versa.
Be human. Emphatic. Quick to praise. Slow to condem. Imagine it was you announcing a similar library. How would you feel to be openly ridiculed in such forum?