A couple years ago I dubbed this trend "Flanders Computing" [1]. I haven't really given much thought about its origins, but it's probably got to do with the increasing demand for happiness that we Americans hold dear.

Collectively I think it's entered the American psyche that the answer to happiness is to avoid anything that makes us anxious or uncomfortable, which results in that toddler-level approach in many things. i.e. Ban things labeled "toxic", ban the boo-boos, keep everyone safe with happy feelings in this space only. But admittedly my thoughts are incomplete.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13353106

I think people would be happier if they did think in terms of a six year old. There is nothing inherently "professional" about using drab and dull interfaces for coding and going to an office where you all dress in identical suits.

There is quiet satisfaction in achieving mastery like you mention, but (IMO) it should be accompanied by a pleasant feeling too. GitHub's cheerful, bright colors and interface enable that for me, and I'm grateful to them for it. GitLab and Bitbucket feel flat, dreary, and dull by comparison, honestly. It's like going to a brightly colored room with nice sofas v/s an all-grey room with a white desk. Which one are you going to be more productive in?

I think this is also why Slack is incredibly successful for something that is basically an IRC-in-browser implementation. It made work "fun" for a lot of people and thus steam-rollered opposers.

The jobs in one corner vs. fun in another usually creates a system where everything that’s fun is unfortunately useless, from a professional perspective.

And some people like that! They want to work for 8 hours and make memes/play games the rest of the time. They don’t miss the “lost” time at all.

But some of us really want to convert that useless time into something useful. You can hate us if you want, but I don’t think we are necessarily wrong to want this.

Example: I just don’t have enough time. I’m noticing now that when I take even 30 minutes off, in terms of my productivity- it hurts. I’ve personally concluded that the concept of “free time” just doesn’t apply to me, and I don’t really have any.

Another example: at a certain level, given the right approach, probably anything can be fun. Physics can be fun! Linear algebra can be fun! But you know as well as I do that when people talk about fun colloquially, they never mean linear algebra. So pushing back on what is “fun” exactly can have big on the job benefits.

In this context, switching 30 minutes over from “mindless entertainment” to “somewhat professionally useful entertainment” is a massive win. Enough to get me to stop doing one thing and do something else, actually.

I would guess a lot of people on Twitter would be in the same boat, based on how they use it.

Depends what you mean by "western society". A good chunk of Europeans I knew (including in Eastern Europe where I live) share the same mindset as your parent poster: a version control is just a tool and it is gauged on the basis of how much it helps you in your work. Absolutely zero fun factor required. We just want it to be useful and not get in the way (which, admittedly, Git itself isn't quite good at).

(II) I'm not a progressive politically, but Western Society has generally improved. Bigger McDonalds meals that make you fatter is "improved" too under the logic of the market. Because developers are relatively scarce, a greater share of this improvement goes to what they want (whereas in burger flipping, the share gone to better golf clubs for execs is comparatively larger).

(III) There's something about law enforcement that attracts a certain kind of personality. I was never drawn to LEO (as a cop, bail bondsman, mall security, anything) because I don't have these personality traits. The same goes for computer programmers. There's certainly a childish trait going on that isn't present in Mad Men's Don Draper (but then, who knows if this guy existed); the web itself gravitates to a light, rounded, primary-colors visual language. I think in part there's a whiz-kid dynamic where many of us were much much more capable than adults in a moment of extraordinary technology shift (the introduction of the internet), whereas in previous generations adults knew better and youngsters wanted to emulate them. ("Never trust anyone over 30" has been around for a long time, but it was an angry sentiment, whereas now 40-year-olds are welcome to emulate whiz-kids if they still have it).

Yes, it is childlike, but there is no shame in that-- if anything, history is proving more and more that the generations who maintained that everything must be as repetitive and miserable as possible had no idea what they were talking about-- and are now dying with active diagnoses of dementia and Alzheimer's.

Among other things, these emotions are addictive and are tracked indirectly via engagement metrics.

"Fun" is a very poor imitation of "zen" or "peace" (the Christian concept) or "enlightenment" (the Buddhist concept), but has become sort of the sine qua non of secular Western democratic capitalist societies.

If nobody does it, it would be fine. If everybody does it, then we're worse off than before. But if some do it, and others don't, then the ones who do it win big.

I've looked at some tools used by Google - mailing lists, Gerrit, etc - none of those look fun. For a casual like me, fun is important.

I don't do much with open source because I don't have the headspace, willpower or persistence to contribute much so the discussion is a bit wasted on me, but I've used both Github, Gitlab and Stash (Atlassian) for work projects; the feedback loop that tools like this give is super important to me.

There are two sides to github consumption - active and passive.

On passive side - we are happy to stick to basics of git on CLI / IDE and get the job done of a version control. And the site is usually to configure CI/CD and so on.

However on active consumption of open source - it is all about discovery of repos relevant to tech you are into and people behind them. It is so amazing to go and find a good committer profile and see what repos he follows.

And the new github trending is simply axing their own feet here.

I'm glad that others have fun with open source and follow along and contribute to projects. It's amazing and it has benefitted me directly with the libraries I use. But as far as the social pressure of needing to be active on Github, for a while that seemed like it might become an expectation for all programmers. And I'm very glad that it seems to be on the decline now.

Edit: and as far as browsing for new libraries and solutions to use in a project, I guess I haven't ever found Github to be very useful for that. There's no easy way to judge the quality of a library, I have come across a lot of things that oversell themselves in the README and are very buggy and incomplete, as well as a lot of things that are maybe used in a small niche in production and very battle hardened but don't currently have a large active community. For me, Twitter and blogs or other discussion forums have been a much higher signal way to find libraries with the reviews of people actually vouching for them as being solid and broadly useful.

But that's just it. It's a bit of limelight. I'm thankful for the interest I've received, but that's all it is, really; it's validation from fellow programmers. It furthers your career in one or two aspects, just like Instagram fuels your self image, or prospects of influencing. But like Instagram, one can chase the limelight their whole life. Ego stroking is addictive. I urge those who come into a bit of limelight to enjoy it, but to stay humble and focus on delivering what you set out to do, not to bask in your temporory moment of glory.

Strange analogy. Many people go into carpentry because they like working with power tools. It's fun.

Programming is the same. Many of us were drawn to it because we like it. It's fun.

If you go through life doing a job that you don't enjoy a tiny bit, you're going to be miserable. Why not have some fun?

GitHub is a well-designed tool for multiple use cases. One aspect was the 'Social Programming' as they were marketing it back then. Trending, stars, fork counts were feeding into that aspect. Even the Issue tracker is a kinda social feature.

I find GitHub as a tool is still a fun/joy/handy to use...if only they fixed the odd bug in mobile view that requires me to refresh several times before it loads the styling files.

But I have been writing open-source code for twenty years. An open repo site is quite useful for that workflow.

I'm an Apple native developer. We aren't usually high on anyone's list.

It also has a great API, and people have written some nice tools for it. The API is probably not unique (or even the best one), but it is well-supported by third parties.

Umm...yes. Yes, I did. Be nice.

I understood what the author was saying. I never wrote that I disagreed with it; just that I viewed it through a different lens.

It appears that I am not alone in using this lens.

MS used be "new, shiny," but now, they are "blue chip."

I don't equate their properties with "fun," but I do believe they are serious about "let's get some work done," which jives with my lens.

One big fad from 50+ years ago that I'd welcome is folders. I don't want to just have all my repositories appear in a flat list ordered by time since last update. I want to make folders so I can organize repositories by topic--just like I have my repositories organized in my computer.

If everyone had to pay $1 to submit an issue and/or a pull request, open source projects would get a lot less "support spam" :)

Also, it would certainly help if people need to wait 10 minutes for their last comment to be accepted into the network before they're allowed to comment again.

but git is already a blockchain. each commit is a "block", with a reference back to the previous commit.

So they should add 2018 me-too fad features?

And I think the Web Development community could do with a decent break from "new" as well. What would be great is if we could just prune some of the gajillion frameworks and libraries already out there, and spend some time to make the ones we keep decently robust and elegant.

Being able to nest orgs will be great so it’s still easy to organize an entire org as well as the ability to drill down.

Even better would be a tag-like structure where orgs can have relationships other than hierarchies. Topics doesn’t really do this now, but maybe could if they improve the topic search.

I thought this was always the point of Organizations..?

The Bedrock edition introduced paid resources which would never have been a thing in the Java edition. Instead of considering cross-play to support the amazing work the CraftBukkit/Spigot devs, they opted to create a new protocol and split the player base. I didn't like the direction where Windows 10 Edition was heading, but I'm glad that there are still thousands of players on Java.

"Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.

[0] https://github.com/gogs/gogs

[1] https://gitea.io/en-us/

I think it’s easy to dismiss conversations like master/slave whitelist/blacklist as overly PC or childish. I certainly don’t appreciate the overly-preachy feeling I sometimes get from people pushing their point of view. And my nature is to find pleasure in giving The Man the proverbial finger. The self righteousness can be intentional on their part, of course, but many times it’s not. I honestly get the similar feelings about the diet-of-the-year fad, too. I have been very lucky in life so far, in that I haven’t struggled with weight or the negative impacts of racism. But I’m discovering that language is an incredibly powerful tool for changing deeply-rooted habits, like which foods you find comfort in, or your default reaction to conflict. When I’ve become an unwilling participant in these changes, I have to ask myself: what is the balance of pros/cons for me and for others? Also, what is my net influence on others who are attempting to do good (no matter my opinion on its effectiveness)? I don’t think I’ve ever changed the default branch for any GitHub repo I’ve worked with. It should theoretically cause no issues at all, I suppose, but I can’t state that with certainty. So there’s a bit of a challenge that I’ll actually enjoy. And I’m not aware of any culture or richness of vocabulary that depends on the dynamic of this set of nomenclature. Besides, I still see words like “serf” and “lord” on a semi-regular basis despite it’s remove from our lifestyles, so these words aren’t disappearing any time soon. On the other hand, it’s hard to deny that racism has scarred our society very deeply. I remember being shocked when my wife told me how young age was when someone first attempted to take advantage of her for sex. I recently felt the same level of shock when my friend told me that she gets called the n word multiple times every day. If our vocabulary can change our mindset, then maybe removing the master/slave dynamic can be a net positive, like removing the vocabulary of war from our daily interactions. We end up turning to other defaults instead of the old ones. Maybe we end up no better off, and decide to change again. Who knows? But personally I don’t see a lot of downside in the attempt to better our world.

Arguably it is much harder and will face much more resistance if GitHub attempted to solicit internship programs, scholarship grants, and supported programs necessary to churn the wheels on rolling back the factors preventing our field from being friendly to a broader demographic set of people.

who has made this accusation?

If you want to keep using your colonialism-inspired language, go ahead and ignore the critics (surely you can't believe github is going to ban you over it) but do not complain about this criticism existing because it makes you uncomfortable that someone does not like the language you use. That's not very liberal.

The Reddit python subreddit is truly awful - it's just beginners sharing their first projects.

Whereas HN is largely biased to what's extremely popular and/or "cool".

I don't like their (electron) desktop app, I always end up using the IRC bridge if any

But is GitHub big enough they can just ignore it and go "bah we're too big now to care about others"?

The author uses the phrase `the new JavaScript “hotness”` in the context of this somehow being a positive. Engineers going after libraries because of their "hotness" instead of because of their utility is exactly the problem with the Javascript (and other "cool" / "trending") ecosystems.