Being Wrong on the Internet
justcramer.com
justcramer.com
"Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" in the context you posted it was a put down. plain and simple. It was rude, and uncalled for.
Refusing to apologize and choosing instead to focus half of your post, on the largely irrelevant issue of whether someone saw misogyny in what your tweet, after spending the other half defending your indefensible original tweet, just strikes me as particularly arrogant and unpleasant.
The real issue here is that on twitter (in certain circles), snark is encouraged/rewarded and looked upon as some proxy for individual brilliance, except this time, you hurt an actual person.
So this one time, chalk it up as an L, say you're sorry and move on with your life, because this post doesn't make you look thoughtful, or smart or decent, just the opposite actually.
Cheers.
At least he just sarcastically criticized a piece of code without any personal attacks unlike your post.
I do, however, find the OP slightly condescending. His main concern seems to be responding to a comment about misogyny (as if that's the meat of the discussion) and otherwise saying "Oh, it's so hard to communicate in 140 chars - you should cut me a break." [1]
The OP passed judgement on some code he found on the internet and decided to publicly ridicule it. Sure, that's his call. Just as it is for everyone else who wants to explain that's it's wrong. It won't be the last time this happens on the internet.
[1] That's 73 chars in case anyone's counting.
or call the wambulance.
draaaaammmaaaaaa...
Give me a break. These guys were acting all superior and they got busted. These attempts at justifying what they said just make them seem like double ass-holes. Just admit you were being horrible or stand by your comment and tell everyone to get lost.
If this is what I can expect from the community after _why's disappearance, I'm going to steer clear of Ruby. Matz being a good guy is not enough to make up for some of a community's most visible figures acting like entitled jerks.
Most of us just want to write code.
The parents post shows precisly the effect of personal behaviour to the communitys image. Hiding behind the group is harmful for it.
That way the Tweet would have got just the same amount of clicks and (initial) shares but the blog post it linked to would have put the thoughts in context and would have avoided the risk of this tweet (who's main criticism in isolation is that it is overly offhand) being mixed in with all the other actually unpleasant tweets.
But, as always, the world could have been perfect in hindsght
Not reinventing the wheel is a valid opinion, although in this case there are valid arguments why reinventing it (windows, learning, preference) is a valid thing to do.
He could easily have said, "I don't understand why this was written. sed and grep are good as they are"
and still have been within the twitter char count.
Realistically though, I could have. I didn't. It doesn't really matter why. I didn't follow what others said, so maybe it was a lot worse, but I do agree that what I said could not have escalated into what this is.
> Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole.
Postel's law:
> Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send
Disappointing that he wrote this[1] in 1980 and we're still getting it wrong.
[1] the original form of this, at least, in RFC 760.
I wonder how critical the HN community would have been if the exchange was with a female programmer? If you read the exchange, you'll see other commenters defending Linus' blunt responses. Linus was harsher than David or Steve, he called the pull requester a moron.
Many people also white knight Linus.
This isn't a boy/girl thing. We are an industry that often prides itself on being hurtful to people we disagree with.
It's my opinion that it's possible to have a strong opinion and strength of conviction without being purposefully rude.
This is a completely different thing to what happened here.
"Btw, Joseph, you're a quality example of why I detest the github interface. For some reason, github has attracted people who have zero taste, don't care about commit logs, and can't be bothered.
The fact that I have higher standards then makes people like you make snarky comments, thinking that you are cool.
You're a moron.
Linus"
In that pull request Linus actually explains quite extensively why he doesn't accept it.
Small steps in humanity sometimes needs to be pulled out with ugly chain.
Everyone learned something. Everyone wins.
Even wars are just a profit drivers.