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Comment by d4vlx | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree with you but it seems to me elitist behaviour like this has a lot of tacit acceptance among developers. I have seen it many times in my career, and have also noticed that workplaces where is is not acceptable tend to make everyone more productive.

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It's a people problem, not a developer problem. Watch the gossip magazines trash actors' clothes and haircuts.

Good point, but some communities seem more civil than others. I went from theoretical computer science to development and there was a noticeable drop in civility. Of course the theoretical computer science community is tiny when compared to software development.

I'm loving the great supportive comments in this thread however.

The difficulty of a subject acts as a filter. For mastering a hard subject you need to be able to control your impulses, which might also cause a more civil behaviour.

I don't think that it's accidentally, that the Haskell community is the most civil community I have been part of. Just being part of it makes myself a nicer and more civil person.

> Watch the gossip magazines trash actors' clothes and haircut

And also reading some of the more interesting messages on the Linux Kernel mailing lists, specifically messages by Linus. It's sometimes entertaining to read them and the responses in defense of Linus because he's awesome. I wonder what the reactions from HN would be if it was Linus, or some really high profile programmer, making these comments?

Sorry, being in a vituperative argument based on some actual issue may be rude, but it isn't the same as spontaneously bullying people on Twitter with zero-content flames about their personal github repos.

Someone gets in a fistfight over a woman, this is not mature, but it's different from cold-cocking strangers on the street because you think it's fun.

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