Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

Fair enough. It just became too much of a risk to put your full private self out there on the internet unless you're a special kind of DGAF, I think.

My main criticism is just that your whole point comes down to "they did things in a way I didn't like!"

So what? They had different personalities or different goals. When I found _why's guide back in 2004 or whatever, at a boring job that involved a lot of sitting around, I learned Ruby as a side effect of poking through this odd little text. That introduced me to concepts I hadn't come across at school learning Java and C, and ended up nudging me into a different direction, so that by the next year I was writing my class projects in Lisp when I could.

If I'd instead come across a sober-minded manual documenting a proper "serious" programming language, I'd have skipped it. That would have sucked. I enjoyed programming a lot more in my own post-_why timeline, even though I agree in retrospect that Ruby isn't a great programming language for serious projects and the twee-ness of the guide itself was a bit grating (to me) at times.

Criticism is easy and mostly useless. There's so much criticism on the internet, seemingly because it makes people feel superior, and I find it exhausting. Just don't use the thing.

I really miss his energy, crazy kind soul of his.

Any criticism boiled down far enough ends up in "they did things in a way I didn't like". It's not a meaningful response.

In this case, the criticism was in response to a perspective on these past events that is in my view overly informed by nostalgia, and while I don't make a general habit of snatching rose-colored glasses off anyone's face, in a public setting and especially in this public setting it is not unreasonable to do so.

I'm glad you found some good in the Poignant Guide. I had a similar experience with the Camel Book, a decade or so earlier, with similarly favorable outcomes - had my mom not proven amenable to being wheedled on the subject of an expensive birthday gift in which she could see no immediate value, I would likely not even be a working programmer today, to say nothing of someone able to grasp some rudiments of what may in a few more decades develop into a recognizable engineering practice. But I don't still use Perl or defend it, because beyond the most ephemeral and exploratory of contexts it is objectively godawful, and even in that context it lacks compared with tools that at least don't falsely advertise themselves as production-worthy. When people criticize it, I understand that they are criticizing it and not me.

And finally, on the point of whimsy versus professionalism - I mentioned the development of engineering practice, and that's a desirable outcome already too long in coming, because when we're trusted to build systems on which people's lives and livelihoods depend, we bear a responsibility of which a whimsical approach to the work constitutes active dereliction. Would you trust your life to a whimsical airplane, or your retirement to a whimsical advisor? Of course not! No one would, nor should they.

Other preparadigmatic engineering disciplines had the advantage of us here; a whimsically designed boiler, for example, will most likely maim or kill its perpetrator well before the bad idea gets much chance to spread, while we easily fall prey to the sorts of delusions that come from working with ideas and materials whose potential danger is much less immediately obvious. I would like us to be better at recognizing and extirpating such errors, and criticizing them where the opportunity arises seems like a decent way to advance that goal. I don't mind if you don't like it, but I would like you not to like it for better thought through reasons than these.

There are many replies to this story about how it got people into the field of programming? Art is one thing, and I'm sure it was a great feeling to create leftpad but these writings sell a mystique that doesn't exist. It has always been people and relationships. I guess I don't know how to explain how it appeared to experienced professional working developers. It was like, here have a ticket for the burnout ride.