[marenkay]

One thing you keep forgetting: your polished 80s software is running the world. Not Slack, not Discord.

You can kill of Slack, no one will be less productive, have a worse work day.

Shut down something old like shell scripting, and almost every IT company on this planet will be down for months if not years.

If you want to improve, you have to start where it begins. Tech starts with small things, but not with Electron apps.

Innovate for all tech people, and thus enable fancy stuff. Make shell scripting as good as writing shell tools in go.

I am with you in terms of iteration and improvements but I get the feeling you have never had to deal with scenarios where guarantees needed to be given for life or death situations. And those are usually the reasons for things you find antiquated or odd. It's worth investigating, I promise.

[Shish2k]

> your polished 80s software is running the world. Not Slack, not Discord.

Comparing chat apps to shell scripting is apples to oranges - let's compare apples to apples:

- Discord: 130 million users

- Slack: 8 million (3 million business users)

- IRC: Optimistically 0.2 million (The best data I can find say 0.1 million, let's be generous and double that)

Given that slack has 15x as many business users as all IRC users combined, I think it's fair to say that Slack has a lot more effect on real-world productivity than IRC does.

The numbers of dropbox users vs rsync users are even more hugely different.

My point here is that there's no technical reason why we can't have great, useful, user-friendly, world-leading open-source software; but the culture of open-source says "let's focus on making shell scripting better, forget about electron apps", and the result of that is that while our developer tools are ok, all of our non-developer software is half-assed clones of proprietary stuff and we're always playing catch-up instead of leading. My worry is that attitude is making the open source community largely irrelevant in modern computing, which is going to be bad for its long-term health :/

[marenkay]

And you have not yet encountered the backlash you get from users as on Open Source developer when you try to implement said useful, user-friendly things?

I have been at that spot various times and users almost always start unleashing hell if your next commit / PR is not that fix etc. they wait for but some general improvement for everyone.

You do that a few times, then the emails arrive, trying to coerce you into doing exactly what a very specific user wants and later threats of DDoS arrive.

Also... those nice tools are usually developed by the same open source people. They pay their salary.