My fellow geeks, we need to have a talk.

You're right. Sometimes.

A hacker writing a quickie web server for the experience of doing so is laudable. This applies to lots of types of projects: toy OSes, social networking protocols, web frameworks, what have you. Exploration is fun, and key to the hacker spirit.

The difficulty comes from knowing the limitations of your skills. I got my web programming chops by reading a bunch of PHP tutorials back in 1998 and throwing together some dummy pages that could read/write to a mysql database. Not long after I built a website for a good friend's business that was riddled with SQL injection and XSS holes. Luckily, we never got exploited, and years later on a rainy Sunday night I revisited the code and patched it up. Had we been hit, I don't know how badly that would have affected the company.

The same goes for home-grown crypto: sure, you might be able to apply a function you wrote and get something that looks like cyphertext, and maybe it's a fun project to learn about crypto. But when you don't know any better, you think you've done it right and you might unintentionally swindle some folks into paying for completely insecure crypto.

What would we think of an American who walked into an Egyptian coffeehouse or a Japanese board room and interpreted all the behavior he saw there as if he were seeing it in a church in Iowa? It's fine to demand that geeks develop some social sophistication, but it's also fine to expect that non-geeks will have enough social sophistication not to rush to judgment about behavior in an unfamiliar cultural context. Cultures vary from place to place, subgroup to subgroup, and there's no reason people shouldn't adapt to us if they want to join our subculture. That's the way it works.

As other people have pointed out, the argumentative, ruthless nature of computing culture has very adaptive aspects because it mirrors the persistent, ruthless, and logical nature of the computers we deal with. Once you're used to dealing with computers -- once you've learned that computers don't compromise, but it isn't personal -- you perceive computer geek behavior differently. The only reason to enter the subculture, except as a tourist, is to learn about computing, so it is reasonable to assume that anybody arguing about how to program a microcontroller either gets us or is in the process of getting us.

Obviously, different rules apply when geeks interact with non-geeks in other contexts. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Xerox PARC, or less exalted forums for discussing computing, do as the computer geeks do.

Each of the `Excellent xxx' response you give differs in two important hitches from the `Insecure xxx':

1) it requires much common context, understanding, experience.

Everybody will understand a ``this sucks'' response, regardless of the reasoning behind it being clear.

Understanding a, and building better solution on, an involved response requires common understanding, common experience, between the parties of communication. (What the heck is a 4/2 split? I dunno, honestly; this response only serves as a distraction to me at that very moment).

Lacking common experience is a communication barrier hard to climb, thus frustrating. It may be that very precise subjects (like computer science) provide for more such barriers, thus more frustration.

2) the ``This sucks'' response lets you vent anger. Now there are two conflicting theories about controlling strong emotions... ;-)

People who lack social tact need to be taught it. They aren't stupid, generally, they can be taught, if it's made clear that they must.

Treating people badly is a great way to drive out those who don't have the ability to deal with flamewars and shoutiness. And many of those people have a lot to contribute.

Except there is much more to a sport than, for example, shooting a basketball. There's offense, there's defense. There's fundamental skills, there's game strategy, there's different sorts of matchups. It goes on and on to subtler and more intricate detail. It's not simply whether one can skateboard or not, program or not, and it would seem that is what the author of the article was getting at.

In your visual arts examples, there is a much simpler explanation. The reason there are more pages devoted toward layout principles is because the medium of expression (i.e. the web) fundamentally uses layout principles. Drawing doesn't express using the web. It's a selection effect, just as it's more likely that you will find soccer players in Brazil, and hockey players in Canada, rather than the other way around.