Edsger Dijkstra - How do we tell truths that might hurt?

On anthropomorphic terminology, I always found his thoughts[1] on that fascinating. While I'm not completely convinced it's a flaw in every case, I find this kind of thinking almost impossible to avoid without lots of effort, which is probably a condition of being human (and learning BASIC first) :-)

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EW...

A Classic: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826080

I'm sure I've also seen it more recently - I'll check ...

(30 minutes later) found it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279260

Many, many comments there.