Thanks for the conversation, and you have a good point there. People can definitely make broad inflammatory statements out of frustration, certainly I did with this article. But I think it's easy to forget how hostile technology can be, especially for people who don't fit the usual mold.
I have been mentoring quite a few people as well as hanging out in a lot of communities, and daily I will see someone explicitly putting not just a language down, but its users, often personally and viciously. I also hear the impact it has on people who come from very different backgrounds, and don't have the confidence to ignore hot takes.
For example, I am autistic, and I take things very literally. Hearing someone calling modern Javascript a scourge and that it destroyed the web pretty much means "You are evil and destroyed the web", and it takes a lot of effort to interpret things differently. It took me 10 years to actually ask for a decent hourly rate, because someone online told me that real programmers know the full stack from the CPU all the way to the graphical interface, which led me down years of studying ASIC design all the way up to type theory, until I realized that real programmers certainly don't know the full stack, and still make a living.
If you don't like a technology, and genuinely want to help people move away from it and get better, I think it's vital to check yourself and see how you can be productive. For example, I genuinely want to hear what you like about Lua, what you dislike about PHP, and vice versa. Now, when I'm talking to my buddies in private, flame away, since they know where I'm coming from.
There is also value in practicing how to communicate these kinds of criticism at the workplace. That's for example why I wrote my article about RFCs.
I definitely have a very high opinion of my fellow developers, and the only thing I find despicable is bullying and putting the work of others down.
I'm definitely trying to find my voice with these articles, my "just be kind" takes on the problem got a very different traction than the more forcible ones. Talking with you helps me refine what I take, and indeed, be more empathetic myself.
The point I wanted to make with "public" criticism is that there are people listening that might take your words differently than just "someone doesn't like XYZ because of their experiences".
The latest experience that ultimately making me write this article was being at a conference, and hanging out with people who out of grad school got a haskell job, calling java programmers "brainless drones that can only program because of their IDE."
What I might expand upon with regard to rejecting technologies say, on their pure technical merits, misses a lot of what programming and technical strategy is in practice. There is always a larger context, and for example WordPress, as much as a despise it when I bang my head against its database schema, is a reasonable choice for say, a small business that wants to self host. As is JAva if you come into a big, completely delusional codebase entirely written in Java.
That might of course not be the kind of work you want to do, and noone forces you, but it's definitely not worth such harsh words.
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Thanks for the conversation, and you have a good point there. People can definitely make broad inflammatory statements out of frustration, certainly I did with this article. But I think it's easy to forget how hostile technology can be, especially for people who don't fit the usual mold.
I have been mentoring quite a few people as well as hanging out in a lot of communities, and daily I will see someone explicitly putting not just a language down, but its users, often personally and viciously. I also hear the impact it has on people who come from very different backgrounds, and don't have the confidence to ignore hot takes.
For example, I am autistic, and I take things very literally. Hearing someone calling modern Javascript a scourge and that it destroyed the web pretty much means "You are evil and destroyed the web", and it takes a lot of effort to interpret things differently. It took me 10 years to actually ask for a decent hourly rate, because someone online told me that real programmers know the full stack from the CPU all the way to the graphical interface, which led me down years of studying ASIC design all the way up to type theory, until I realized that real programmers certainly don't know the full stack, and still make a living.
If you don't like a technology, and genuinely want to help people move away from it and get better, I think it's vital to check yourself and see how you can be productive. For example, I genuinely want to hear what you like about Lua, what you dislike about PHP, and vice versa. Now, when I'm talking to my buddies in private, flame away, since they know where I'm coming from.
There is also value in practicing how to communicate these kinds of criticism at the workplace. That's for example why I wrote my article about RFCs.
I definitely have a very high opinion of my fellow developers, and the only thing I find despicable is bullying and putting the work of others down.
I'm definitely trying to find my voice with these articles, my "just be kind" takes on the problem got a very different traction than the more forcible ones. Talking with you helps me refine what I take, and indeed, be more empathetic myself.
The point I wanted to make with "public" criticism is that there are people listening that might take your words differently than just "someone doesn't like XYZ because of their experiences".
The latest experience that ultimately making me write this article was being at a conference, and hanging out with people who out of grad school got a haskell job, calling java programmers "brainless drones that can only program because of their IDE."
What I might expand upon with regard to rejecting technologies say, on their pure technical merits, misses a lot of what programming and technical strategy is in practice. There is always a larger context, and for example WordPress, as much as a despise it when I bang my head against its database schema, is a reasonable choice for say, a small business that wants to self host. As is JAva if you come into a big, completely delusional codebase entirely written in Java.
That might of course not be the kind of work you want to do, and noone forces you, but it's definitely not worth such harsh words.