Blog – Page 27 – The Renegade Coder

Lately, I've come to realize that the vocal minority in the coding community (read: elitists) seems to think that real coders are infallible—incapable of making a mistake. Now, if real coders are truly infallible, what then is the point of developer tools like IDEs, text editors, continuous integration, and version control? Is there no irony in coder infallibility? Today, I ask everyone to remember that our profession requires compassion. A Tweet Turned Article Recently, I tweeted the following: It's funny; As programmers and engineers, we understand that many machines exist to reduce or eliminate human error. Yet, heaven forbid we make some sort of stylistic mistake or use some anti-pattern. We're not infallible. This tweet came in response to my growing frustration with the vocal minority of elitists in the coder community. Unfortunately, my feelings couldn't be fully articulated in a 280-character tweet, so I turned to my website and started writing. Run-ins with Elitists Of course, my anger with these elitists didn't just spawn out of nothing. In fact, just about every time I put out an article, someone comes along and spews some form of hate. Below are just a few examples: The Anti-Scala Snob A little while back I kicked off my Hello World in Every Language series. At some point in that series, I added the Hello World in Scala article. Within 24 hours, I got this beauty of a comment on Google+: stop misleading people, SCALA IS BULLSHIT since if we want to do anything useful with it we will need to use SBT and sickos like you make sure not to mention SBT to the unsuspecting newbies. Now, can anyone tell me why I'm being roasted here? I sure can't. Apparently, I'm not supposed to include Scala in my series because this person doesn't like it. Duly noted. Clearly, they never even read the article, let alone understood the article's context within the series. The Taken-Literally Genius In addition to the Anti-Scala Snob, I also encountered someone who was clearly not a fan of my Hello World in Every Language series: Not even a start on "every language". COBOL (it's very much not dead - even today, 90% of all VISA credit card transactions hit at least some COBOL along the way)?APL? RPG II? RPG III? FORTRAN? Jovial? Ada? Anything LISP based? Algol descendants? Pascal? Assembly coding for all the architectures out there (I only admit to having made money at IBM S/360 S/370, DEC PDP-11, DEC-20, and Intel 386 assembler) Now when I released that article, I had maybe 12 languages, so they're criticism was valid. However, there literally can't be a collection that contains every language—at least not for long. I only use that phrase because that's what I searched on Google to find The Hello World Collection. At any rate, this comment was just downright rude and incoherent. It's almost as if they seemed offended that the modest collection didn't contain any dinosaur languages that they used to use. Why not share your knowledge instead of being an asshole? Examples in the Community Of course, I'm not the only one susceptible to elitist roasting. In fact, I see it everywhere. The VimL Expert While considering the addition of VimL to my collection, I stumbled upon the following StackOverflow comment: I don't think "Vim script" could ever be an official name, because it's not grammatically a "proper name" at all. Proper names have all words capitalized, as in "Vim Script". See, e.g., It doesn't make sense to say, "I Vim script is written in Vim script." But it does make sense to say "A Vim script is written in Vim Script." Having said all that, I would vote for VimL, which is also the name github uses for the language. Wow! So, this expert decides to publicly roast the grammar of the person asking the question. In no way does this answer provide anything meaningful to the conversation beyond the last sentence, so what was the point of all that elitist blabbering? The Comment Snob One time I was scrolling through Twitter when I saw a funny tweet about commenting code: https://twitter.com/acdlite/status/981335531656159233 Of course, some elitist came out of the woodwork with the following reply: My experience is largely if code is hard to explain than you haven't found the right abstractions yet. Now, that's snobbery at its finest, isn't it? In other words: Excuse me, you're code sucks because you haven't put enough time into it. –The Comment Snob, probably If you're going to be a snob, at least use "then" rather than "than." The Testing Tyrant I wish at this point we could move on to a new example, but unfortunately Aaron took even more abuse: Funny thing is that those comments could be easily split into test cases, since I see a couple of examples written. In that case I would simply point them to the test cases. Alright? Thanks for your two cents, fam. It's one thing to share a helpful tip. But, I find that many times people prefer to assert their intellectual superiority rather than offer a helping hand. The Irony in Coder Infallibility I share these experiences because they demonstrate a hilarious bit of irony. We, as coders, love to roast each other as we collectively make ourselves redundant. Is that not insane? As engineers and developers, our job is to use whatever tools are available to improve the lives of others. When we attack each other, we only stifle our efforts.