> The OP was writing about a 29 year old design decision, and he wasn’t writing about a person. Design decisions don’t have feelings. I found his no holds barred clarity about something as obscure as dynamic linking namespaces made for an easier if still not easy read.
I don't think that it would've been hard to maintain the exact same level of clarity regarding the subject matter. Perhaps the read was more entertaining due to the abrasive tone, but was it actually easier to read?
Ultimately, design decisions are made by people - if someone made such a takedown of ideas of mine, I would probably be somewhat discouraged, at least as long as I know they are being sincere and not just doing a bit. I don't think people should be flinching in their criticisms of ideas, but being fair to nuance and history really would be welcome too. It's one thing to point out dysfunctions in things, but it's different to pull out a sort of Angry Video Game Nerd-esque personality and drag how horrible things are through the mud.
Maybe this post is more in jest than not and I(/we?) simply did not pick up on the tone being purely for entertainment value. But that's the thing. When people read things like this, I think a lot of people take it too seriously and start to embody this attitude, and it leads to the kind of thought processes where things are either good, or stupid/evil/whatever, with no room for things that are just "not perfect, but overall fine."
Hell, I feel kind of bad due to how unnecessarily personal my comments regarding this feel. How would the author feel reading this? The fact that I may be right doesn't matter, because I'm not some kind of uncaring asshole, and I think most people are not if they are in the right mind.
> But that said, I don’t think dynamic linking is in the ELF spec. I believe that’s a de facto OS + dev tools thing rather than an ELF spec de jure thing. His points are still valid.
Like I had said initially, I do not take any issue with the factual content of the post, and agree that most people should be using these compiler flags. And yes, it is, however many years later from when this may have not been the norm, now clearly a good idea to make all of your symbols hidden by default. No disagreements from me. I just hope that people don't walk away with the idea that some morons from the past made some horribly stupid mistakes because they just had no idea what they were doing. I wasn't there, but it doesn't feel like that's what happened at all; it feels like as things panned out some things worked out well, and some things did not work out well. Some ideas are more clearly 'bad' ideas than they were. Even today, it would probably be unwise to assume we still know 100% what we're doing. Personally, I think it's hard to ever be absolutely sure you are taking the right lessons away from things that don't work out well.