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Contempt Culture

So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages

And suddenly I was thinking about all the myriad ways that someone with that background would feel othered by me, like they didn’t belong and weren’t welcome in the communities I was a part of. This pattern is common in tech, from extremely high-profile projects like the Linux kernel to the ongoing os/language/editor“wars” to the vile reactionary attitudes towards the introduction of Codes of Conduct, to any developers making disparaging comments about other peoples’ ability to code, and the growing contempt around people whose first or primary language is JavaScript. Tools that we mocked them for asking about, telling them to get a real language, to rewrite their entire app, to rebuild from scratch because their particular path was not blessed enough.

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