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>> "...it never actually happened?"

The premise of the article is not at all that cargo cults never happened. Instead, the article acknowledges that cargo cults happened, but claims they are misunderstood and often ill-documented, and therefore unsuitable for software metaphors.

The "never happened" claim is waaaay stronger and likely no credible or serious observer would make the "never happened" claim.

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So what? If the argument is "ok, cargo cults did happen, but the reality of them has nothing to do with how we use 'cargo cult' as a poor software development metaphor, but we're still going to use it that way anyway"... that... seems worse, actually?

I think it's kinda shitty to make up a pejorative story about a group of people to describe a bad practice. But it seems really dumb to take a real story about that group of people, and then completely misinterpret it (intentionally or otherwise) and use it in a way that makes no sense.

It's no more pejorative than "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

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