programmer culture lamenting, "jokes"
So there's that Wat talk by Gary Bernhardt. Pretty funny, I felt at the time it came out - not something to take seriously, of course, just something to blow off some steam.
And then I noticed people starting to take it seriously. It started coming up in discussions, as if it were a legitimate argument about a language being 'bad'. It started being used to attack programmers writing in those languages, and question their competence.
And then Gary Bernhardt himself, the speaker in that talk, turned out to be somewhat of a language-elitist ass.
Since then I've taken a rather more grim view of these kind of overly simplified 'jokes' about programming languages. Because it turns out, they mostly punch down, and quite often they're not really jokes at all, they're just someone looking for an excuse to talk down on others.
re: programmer culture lamenting, "jokes"
@joepie91 damn, I haven't thought about Gary Bernhardt since I was like 20. That sucks that he's an ass. I think it was him that talked about the shapes of a file helping him to visually confirm a given class looks like it's supposed to, and as a dyslexic person with adhd who has trouble reading, especially code, it helped me explain why properly formatted style guided code helped me a lot (in addition to syntax highlighting).
I kind of forgot about him once I felt comfortable coding regularly on my own. I would find it very silly if someone used the wat talk to explain why they hated ruby or python or javascript or whatever. The talk at the time felt like just a joke.