There are about 3.6 million software developers in the United States, and over 18 million worldwide. Every month 40 million people visit the site Stack Overflow to learn about programming, and more than 50% of them are interested in JavaScript. Survey analysts estimate that of these 40 million people, about 17 million are professional developers or university students. The rest might be learning to code, hobbyists, or otherwises curious individual.
The JavaScript community is massive, and people use the language to solve a diverse set of problems. Fortune 500 companies use it for their e-commerce platforms, game designers and journalists use it to create interactive content that can be delivered almost instantly via a web browser. People who have no interest in becoming professional devlopers use it to tweak their portfolio sites and personal blogs, ad-men use it to gather and sell people's private information.
That's a lot of people. And they're solving a lot of different problems. Despite this diversity of userbase and task, discourse in the open source JavaScript world often takes on an all-or-nothing mentality: since this tool doesn't work for me, it must be terrible.
I reject this attitude. Sure, there's a lot of terrible software out there, but we shouldn't cast stones at something just because it doesn't fit into our workflow. I don't think I'll ever have a need for a this thing that turns trees into logs, but I can understand the use for it, and think its a pretty cool machine.
http://i.imgur.com/QXaORxD.gif
Who is this for, and why?
One concrete thing that open source maintainers can be do to combat this attitude is to make it very clear (1) who the intended audience for the tool is, and (2) why they would want to use use it.
Put this right up front, at the top of your READMEs and documentation pages. It will make a difference, I promise. Are you designing for enterprise teams or individual developers on a deadline? What other assumptions do you make about the worldview of your users?
https://i.imgur.com/RxmHo69.gif
Don't shame people for the tools that they do use. A script tag and jQuery are perfectly acceptable to use in 2018 if you just want to make a few tweaks to an otherwise static site. Stop telling your artist friends to learn Redux just to make some tweaks to their personal site.
Paying for software
The elephant in the room here is that in order to engender a healthy ecosystem of specialized tools, developers need to be able to support themselves making these tools. That means that they either need to sell these tools, or find a model for monitizing them as open-source software.
It also means that companies need to start paying for software. If you are a developer who works for an organization, congratulations: you work for an organization that can afford to hire a software developer, and can afford to pay for software!
If there are procurement or other procedural problems at your institution, tell developers about this so that they can make it easier for companies to pay them. While I appreciate the sentiment of command line tools like thanks, I think that it is fighting the wrong battle. A professional developers working at the command line is the wrong target, those expenses should be going on a manger's corporate card.
https://i.imgur.com/IaaYlO7.gif
Thanks to the Specialized Tools page on Reddit for all of these inspiring GIFs.