Contempt Culture (2015)
I disagree with the article.<p>There is a lot of bad technology being pushed via social hacks - examples include PHP, MongoDB, NodeJS and Go. Typically the social hacks are low learning curve + easy tutorials that gloss over important details [1] + rapid setup + culture of piling on tech debt (e.g. rails ignoring how relational DBs work).<p>Technical superiority, particularly if that superiority requires people to learn new things, has demonstrated an inability to gain traction.<p>So if we want superior technologies to win, we&#x27;ll need to engage in some social hacks of our own. Vocal and demonstrable elitism is a valid social hack - if the people who are demonstrably great coders are proponents of Haskell and sneering at PHP, while the code monkeys are all using PHP, that&#x27;s a pretty clear social signal. Who wants to be part of the code monkey crowd?<p>When I was younger, and nothing but a BasicA&#x2F;Visual Basic coder, these attitudes pushed me towards learning C and Perl (yes I&#x27;m showing my age). I saw all the better coders using these superior technologies with a higher learning curve. I realized that I had a lot to learn, I put in the effort and I learned it. With the decline of hacker culture, I don&#x27;t see that happening anywhere near as much these days.<p>[1] E.g. a while back there were RoR tutorials that used update_attributes (skipping input validation) to show how easy RoR is. Net result was various hacks, I think including Homakov&#x27;s hack of github.