I thought the goal was to "clean up the nasty tone of this ng"
I actually tried to give this thread a chance.
Self-defense isn't part of the problem. I am talking about the quiet
and apparently civil attack on credibility that has no place in a
paraprofession which never has established a consensus on good
practise, and where good practise is for that reason, in the eye of
the beholder, and in the collective eye of small groups.
Humorous hyperbole as above actually improves the tone. The problem is
the constant, whining, clerkish, lower middle class and grim struggle
to be right at all costs.
This struggle winds up constituting the "real world", a second nature
of office politics in which we "have to" do ridiculous things such as
use C because the top man doesn't know a more modern language.
Working together harmoniously is indeed job one, but this real
solution is also a real problem, since most of us were evolved to work
best with members of our gene pool, not strangers. We're thrown into
situations where we have to do stupid things in an intelligent way,
such as master an infantile disorder of a language where that mastery
rewires our brains permanently to be somewhat more stupid than we
were.
For example, I fear this happened to Brian Kernighan. The Kernighan I
met in 1987 and who wrote The Elements of Programming Style is a
better person than the man who praises Ritchie for writing code in an
hour and condemns object orientation for being microslow in Beautiful
Code. I was praised for writing code in an hour in 1972 but I wanted
enough time to write a compiler so that I would not have to use
assembler, and as I show in my book, the very idea that a programming
approach is "slow" or "fast" cannot be even grammatically expressed in
proper English.
Mass media was famously characterised by Adorno and Horkheimer as
psychoanalysis but in reverse, maing us more fearful and less
compassionate. Programming may be this on steroids or a better
metaphor might be that it's neurosurgery in reverse.
For example, we now know that software is best defined in terms of
objects in graphs, lattices and trees with names, not von Neumann's
row of boxes with addresses. But this is almost impossible for the
rewired C programmer to grasp.