It's a common thing I see with programmers. I know I've been guilty of it before. I see some poorly coded module and I'm just disgusted of how bad it is and then proceed to say some of the nastiest things about the developer who wrote it, sometimes just aloud to myself, other times to my peers.

These days I do my best to try to remember we all make mistakes, and that instead of flaming whoever is responsible for a mistake when it rears its ugly head, it's probably best to take it as an opportunity to discuss what I saw as shortcomings in the code with them and turn it into a learning experience if possible. Sometimes of course this isn't possible when you inherit code from devs who are long gone. Either way, I'm not sure any good is done throwing all that negative energy into the air.

It seems to be part of HN culture. Putting down this code make people feel better about themselves. Because obiously this is bad, even they can see that.

There is certainly value to the post but, yes, the flaming gets old - very quickly.

Unproductive, probably; fun to write, definitely.