Contempt Culture (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Contempt Culture (2015)

blog.aurynn.com

23 pointsrfreytag41 comments

Yesterday I made a prototype of a very small dynamic webpage (less than 50 lines of code). I am the only person who will ever visit this page. PHP was the obvious tool to use—but I still found myself stopping to question that choice, in large part because of the contempt for PHP that I have seen online.

Incidentally, I am not a software developer—I’m an artist and art historian. I have no real need for hacker cred. And yet I still find myself trying to earn it by doing things the hard way.

Which is all to say: this post resonated with me, and I really appreciate the insight.

You are not the only person who will visit that page. Bots will find it. Bots will exploit it. And even if you don't end up footing the bill, you'll be adding to the general noise and badness pervading the net.

What a joke, leave the poor guy alone.

A quick google suggests that approximately 80% of the internet runs on php. I dont think you need to worry.

Hell, use comic sans and have pineapple on pizza, too. Some folks just hate eveything.

Ironic how those who purport to be concerned about inclusivity are always the most eager to impose their culture on everyone else. Because this is, genuinely, a cultural difference, and there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Many people - including but not limited to the neurodiverse - find the direct, honest, style of traditional hacker culture makes for a community where they are not only more productive, but also personally happier.

Saying a language sucks and the people who use it are bad programmers is not merely a "direct, honest style". At least to my understanding, the article is talking less about good-faith critiques of languages, and more about snide and uncharitable remarks.

> Saying a language sucks and the people who use it are bad programmers is not merely a "direct, honest style".

I submit that if your preferred culture does not admit a way of expressing that a language sucks, or a person is a bad programmer, then it is dishonest. I'm not sure whether hiding your value judgements about languages and programmers is better or worse than giving up on making those judgements at all, but certainly neither creates an environment that I want to be part of.

It’s obvious that the language you think is appropriate sucks terribly…

You changed the “and” in what you quoted to an “or,” then criticized that very different statement. In the original quote, the “and” acts like “therefore”:

> Saying a language sucks therefore the people who use it are bad programmers is not merely a "direct, honest style".

Of course people need to evaluate the utility of languages and the aptitude of programmers. “All programmers who use X are bad programmers” is the snide and uncharitable remark, not either clause on its own.

Imagine saying something similar about written languages that are also spoken by humans.

> So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages.

... De rigueur, perhaps? Du jour basically means "of the day" (du = "de le", or "of the", jour = day) as encountered in things like "soup du jour".

Perhaps this definition:

> used to describe something that is enjoying great but probably short-lived popularity or publicity.

Though de rigueur could also work, meaning something that is required by the current fashion (or the then current fashion here).

Like the "fashion trend du jour." I still think using it as in this post is unnatural.

They almost certainly mean de jure, meaning “according to an official or legitimate proclamation,” as opposed to de facto.

That would make even less sense. De jure = by law (but by implication not in practice).

I don’t think it is used to mean literally by law. It means that the practice (being critical of other languages) was formally or explicitly encouraged by the community, rather than being an unspoken but common practice.

De jure is almost exclusively used when there's a contrast between theory and practice. "The UN seat is still held by the de jure government of Afghanistan, but de facto, the Taliban now have full control of the country."

Yes. The writer was clearly referring to the practices which were explicitly condoned by that organization. The organization was not literally a government, but the term still makes perfect sense when referring to the governance of an organization. The writer’s point was that being critical of other languages was not simply something that happened in practice, but was an explicitly condoned behavior.

No, they were saying the practice is demanded by custom, which is precisely what de rigueur means.

There is no organization of snobby Pythonistas etc mandating that its members make fun of PHP, and even if there was, de jure wouldn't make any sense. Quite the opposite, in fact, since it was de facto required to be critical of PHP.

So criticizing PHP as a programming language is "actively participating in the exclusion of women from STEM"? That seems like a big leap to me.

Perhaps indirectly. Though that's not the focus of the article. Rather that language/platform gatekeeping is counterproductive and harmful to growing the community.

Straw man. Author didn't say criticizing a language's flaws at all is problematic. Dismissive, arrogant, "X language sucks and so do people who use it" language is problematic.

It can be boiled down to the difference between constructive criticism vs. bullying. One is productive, the other just serves to make the person saying it feel better and reinforce exclusivity and an air of superiority.

It's harder to code in bad languages. Someone who does the same thing in a bad language that someone else can do in a better language is a better programmer, not a worse programmer. I may be a little biased because I just spent three hours wrangling with a scripting interface which is, to this day, in IronPython 2.7. It's bad. Don't sugarcoat it.

Suppose some poor people wear bad shoes and enter races. Sometimes they even win despite the shoes. Does this imply that they are bad runners? Should we conclude that no shoes are bad, because shoe criticism might make them feel excluded? We can't. That would deprive them of what they deserve: better shoes, sooner rather than later.

Criticism of languages should not be extended to those using the language, but it can't be abolished.

The opposite of "contempt culture" is bad too. It's an environment where negative feedback is considered unhelpful by definition, everyone has to be fake-nice, no one ever says what they think and so on.

Yours may differ but my experience is that this (the opposite of "contempt culture") is a much more common situation.

> the vile reactionary attitudes towards the introduction of Codes of Conduct

I really like this post aside from this very small point, because codes of conduct can only be used to exclude people. The obvious counterpoint is that we can't know how many people are silently excluded by tolerating any particular person, and yeah that definitely happens, but I still don't like it on principle :)

[agree] I consider referring to people as "vile" for having a different opinion on how to organize a community to be pretty contemptuous.

Except that the author doesn't refer to any person as vile. They refer to the attitude as vile.

To put a finer point on it, they are referring to particular attitudes as vile, not necessarily all attitudes that came out in opposition to codes of conduct.

It seems to me that this article reflects a lack of cultural awareness. I read things like

> I saw a presenter at a Python conference make fun of Java. How would that feel to people trying to move from Java into something else? I wouldn’t feel welcome, and I’d have learned that the idea that the Python community is welcoming wasn’t true.

and I feel exactly the opposite! Every Java programmer I know has a roster of "Java sucks" jokes; if a Python presenter made a good one, I'd feel like they're one of us and be more interested in the rest of what they have to say.

The author does mention they've been programming for substantially longer than me, so it could be there's a streak of true meanness somewhere that I've been lucky enough not to encounter, but I'm not really convinced it's common today or was common in 2015.

There's a kind of self-deprecating humor that people engage in which is humorous to themselves and their community, but is insulting coming from other people. If the presenter was one of the people coming from Java to Python, the humor is reasonable. If the person has never written Java past their college courses and never worked in Java, then it's more insulting (or risking being more insulting) than humorous.

People really do rip on PHP from what I’ve seen. Not sure about Java developers though. I work on a node.js team and the only fun we made with an incoming Java dev was to joke that things will be easier now that he doesn’t have to worry about types. And then he switched us to using Typescript.

A Python presenter at a Java conference making fun of Java would be “punching up” - and if I was a Java programmer in the audience I might feel some camaraderie over it as you described. Others might think “oooh that’s brave!”

But the situation presented here is different - a Python presenter at a Python conference making fun of Java - that’s just straight tribalism.

Jokes have a lot of purposes but one of them is to enforce in/out groups. And a presenter at language conference X picking on language Y is reinforcing in-group/out-group.

Maybe that's the core difference. I can't imagine a Python programmer considering Java programmers to be a different tribe or an outgroup, and I don't think I've ever been in an environment where people think that way. To me it's like poking fun at a friend for eating chocolate ice cream when I only like vanilla.

Previously (76 comments, 2016): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12343755

Well, yes, in 2001, PHP was a badly designed, objectively bad language. Cannot deny.

The problem is not with the language, or whatever other suboptimal circumstances people may have. The problem is in the desire to mock, to put oneself on a whatever kind of higher ground, in lack of humility and compassion.

If somebody had to use PHP in 2001 (like e.g. the Wikipedia project), one should rather find out what forced them to use that language. Existing libraries, hosting options (a big thing about shared hosting offers prevalent in 2001), some other constraints. Considering other people no less intelligent than yourself, and respecting their choices as likely rational instead of deriding them as "obviously stupid", takes some growing up.

This problem happens more often to teenagers than to people with some more life experience. The computing world got filled with students and high-schoolers in 1990s as reasonably powerful PCs and the Internet became accessible. A lot of things were in their infancy then. It was unfortunately hard to expect maturity and humility from an average community member in nearly any newly-appeared community.

History can't be redone, but at least we can avoid repeating it in the future.

Taking yourself and your work too seriously is the crux of the issue. Just lighten up and have some fun

In the interest of presenting this (good) argument without invoking social justice, here's a related post: https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/10/19/empathy-and-su...

Sortof?

I think saying "haha PHP sucks, <my language> rules" is marker of immaturity. Presumably because it's beginners who think that showing contempt indicates superiority.

With more experience, you understand the value of trade-offs, and learn to live with flaws of legacy/historical decisions, etc.

I wonder how much of this is tech 'Asshat' culture, and how much is Russian macho culture.

Or maybe, PHP is a crappy tool, steeped in a culture of historically crappy tools.

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