Why I don't write about programming and why it's not really worthwhile to do so

Maybe it's relative to what other audiences you also encounter, but I haven't found things too bad in the programming blogosphere. Sure, there are jerks, but there are jerks everywhere. My day-job is in academia, and there are a lot of jerks at academic conferences. You're more likely to get someone furious that you're intruding on their area, or critical that you aren't using their preferred methodology or citing their papers, than you are to get someone genuinely interested in understanding what you're doing and why. I actually sometimes find the tech-blog reception friendlier, on the occasions I've ventured some of my academic work online.

Admittedly, it might be worse if I were a celebrity blogger with tons of readers; when only relatively few people read you, generally it's only people who have some reason to like your work that would bother commenting.

Sons, I am disappoint.

Scriptor, you were misunderstood, I can clearly see that. But something else is interresting here. You seemed to attack someone who is respected in the programming community, as a result the 'defender' gets many upvotes. I would like to now, why people feel compelled to 'defend' the respected guys. Is this cultish?

I don't blog about programming for different reasons...

I find that any really interesting programming problem is too complex to be reduced to prose in a form digestible in someone's 10-minute blog break. Yeah, I could post about the umpteenth-zillion Sudoku solver, or about this tricky Haskell problem I solved - but if it's general enough to be broadly interesting, it's too shallow to be enlightening, and if it's deep enough to be useful, it's probably too specific to have a widely interested readership. Worse, I feel that by participating in the blogosphere, I'm deluding myself into thinking that these information soundbites are worth anything, and taking up my attention with little factoids that distract me from getting actually interesting work done.

I find that the value of writing about programming is in the "Why?" and the "Roads not taken" of software systems. So I keep a development journal of my personal projects. At the very least, it keeps me from revisiting design decisions I've already decided. But this doesn't need to be public to serve its purpose, and I've found that making it public anyway is too distracting to maintain forward momentum on the projects. Instead, I open things up after the project has succeeded or failed, like I did with Diary of a Failed Startup and like I'll hopefully do with this programming language I'm developing. No, it's not the ego boost that constant, instantaneous feedback gives you - but that ego boost becomes a drug that keeps you from functioning when people (as the article points out) turn on you, as they inevitably do.