"This is the first indicator that the plane has crashed,” said Jonathan Skinner, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, who reviewed the study and co-authored a commentary that appears with it. “I don’t know what’s going on, but the plane has definitely crashed."
This basically sums up my fears. Whatever is going on, economics is at the root of it.
That seems like a very sheltered perspective. It is clear that Mr. Torvald used the language he did to express and support his thesis. This was not a personal attack, a lashing out, or any other sort of fit. There was a clear message: stop writing shit code. He began by explaining his definition of 'shit code' with an example. Then, he explained why we don't want it. Finally, he presented a solution. He did all of this while still conveying his conviction. Sure, we could sit around crying about the f word, or we could accept the fact that sometimes when we do shitty things to people it pisses them off. Mr. Torvald was clearly pissed off from people doing shitty things to him. In this case, trying to taint a project he's spent the last decade working on. Should he have hidden this frustration just to appeal to your PC upbringing? Absolutely not. It was refreshing to read something sincere. Toxic? That code was toxic. That code would have had real world consequences that affect millions of people. A few harsh words mean nothing in comparison.
"00:12drmjgoh no. #1 we can but as you know is not like we go and delete each account instantly as 80% of users who requests account deletion come back after two weeks to requests their account back and are mad we deleted it
00:12drmjg#2 people who requested account deletion in pasts used the accounts for credit card fraud and then re-create new ones"
I believe they are putting forth the case that the kind of developer that doesn't make Unix-like tools, doesn't use Unix-like tools. And that this issue is not a case of everyone doing things shitty (not making things Unix-like), but that it is the god damn creatives making all this bad software. These fucking people don't appreciate the art of programming, and think software is about the destination and not the journey. That's my take anyway.
I really dislike when an article waits til the end to explain why I shouldn't care. First half of the article is all about how we should worry and care about this thing. Second half of the article is, "actually you should just disregard everything we just said."
My wife (tech writer) calls this the 'mystery novel' form of essay. She says Engineers are particularly guilty of writing that way. She was right, in my case anyway. For a while after I married her I would go through all my writing and move the last sentence in each paragraph to first. Because I did it all the time.
This basically sums up my fears. Whatever is going on, economics is at the root of it.