... By raising the barrier of entry, and only permitting "real" programming languages (ie, "C" based ones)
Frankly I think, and I'm sure many here would agree, this is bullshit.
[edit] The rest of the post only gets worse. Very little facts and plenty of noise.
Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer ( usually the mistake is to employ sarcasm in first place ).
And I am extremely surprised there's a person out there that didn't get it.
Sarcasm on the internet is totally a good idea!
it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious
I completely disagree on both counts. First of all, just because some people get duped doesn't make sarcasm a bad idea. In fact, getting duped by sarcasm can be an educational experience.
Second of all, there is a lot of sarcasm and satire out there that is so obvious that it is a clear reading comprehension failure to miss it. If there is enough appropriate context, voice, and tone in a piece of writing and you fail to detect any of it, it may not be the fault of the writer. You can't just take a whole style or mood of expression and say it's not appropriate for written form. The most you can say is that it should be used with care. In this particular piece, the proposals and ideas put forth were very obviously constructed to be self-contradicting. If someone didn't mark this as satire when reading through it, they have a reading comprehension problem.
Then sarcasm in print must not be a good idea either, because if you can't convey tone and emotional nuance in text on the internet, certainly text in a dead-tree publication suffers from the same problem, right? What's fundamentally different between the two? The level of possible distribution? The ease at which one can be a publisher on the internet vs. in a print medium?
Or is there another reason why internet sarcasm is a bad idea that I'm not seeing?
> Don't feel bad, it's never the readers fault when sarcasm isn't obvious, that's always the fault of the writer
Preposterous. Some of the best sarcasm I've read isn't immediately obviously sarcastic. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Sometimes the writer sucks at being sarcastic, and sometimes the reader has a poorly-developed sense of humor. But that's ok! An ability to understand well-crafted sarcasm isn't a prerequisite for living in the world.