Let&#x27;s stop trashing on people&#x27;s work.<p>The success of an endeavor is proportional to the number of shitty hacks that have come before it.  Sometimes this it true in a literal sense -- sometimes a project consists of shitty hacks.  But the astute reader will notice that a hack is only known to be shitty because <i>someone did it</i>, and had the courage to make their example public.<p>Do we reward their courage?  No.  We act like cliquish teenagers and rip them apart.<p>I don&#x27;t mean to single you out.  But this subthread consists of a developer at Amazon, an unknown, and a founder -- the very types of people I wanted to respect -- yet the content is little more than &quot;Look at how stupid these people are.&quot;  What kind of example are we setting here?<p>Be excited about X!  Whether X is FOAM, Javascript, COBOL, C++, Python, Erlang, Scheme, NPM, ASDF, Vim, Stallman, or a song.  Be happy.  Be amused.  Be anything but bitter.<p>In this instance, FOAM shows what&#x27;s possible.  Is it necessarily a good idea?  Who cares!  We&#x27;ve learned something new!  Be excited!<p>How certain are you that an idea that strikes you as bad is actually bad?  For every possible circumstance?  What about with a slight tweak?  In fact, &quot;An idea that seems bad&quot; is the short definition of &quot;startup.&quot;<p>Most ideas that seem bad are, in fact, bad.  But it&#x27;s important to fully explore the problem space before dismissing them, else you&#x27;ll dismiss Facebook.<p>This subthread is about a software technique, not a startup idea.  But is it really such a different domain?  Would the idea of Python have survived if it had been introduced in the era of Multics?  It wasn&#x27;t a compiled language, so it couldn&#x27;t hope to survive back then.  Yet its time was coming, whether or not it would have been dismissed at the time.<p>&quot;Under what circumstances could this be a good idea?&quot;  That&#x27;s the valuable question.  And if you also have a good answer to &quot;Why now?&quot; then you may be onto something.  In fact, you might be one of the first people to notice that an idea has flipped from bad to good.  Seems like a pretty powerful position.<p>It seems like most influential work started as a hack.  (TeX is a notable exception.)  So if you want to do influential work, be delighted by hacks.  It&#x27;ll make them easier to explore, and you might end up in a position few others realize is valuable.