It's hard to not take things personally

Sam Stephenson of Prototype.js fame shares his experience with Prototype getting superseded by jQuery:

It was hard not to take Prototype’s failure personally. Critical blog posts felt like a full assault on my values. And seeing friends use other libraries made me feel like my work was a waste.

It's part of the pain of being a creator, to watch the world interact with your creation, without regard to your feelings or the process you had to go through to get to the place where you were able to create it.

There are actually things about prototype I miss. I really liked using $() for element IDs, instead of general selectors, and I liked all of those extensions to core Javascript objects. But clearly jQuery has the momentum these days, and it's much easier to just work with what everyone else is using, even though the code is not always as pretty.

But in response to Sam's post: Learning to not take anything personally is a great life skill for all of us to master. Whether it's the rude guy in line at the supermarket or your wife or boss being upset with you. It's never about you.