Comment by theoh

It's the first time I read this blog post (thanks for sharing) but it's not surprising to me.

I always cringe when I see people quoting Bryan because that's exactly my experience interacting with him on mailing lists or watching him give talks.

At this point I don't have the energy to deal with people like him. I just accept him as a natural occurrence in our field. I certainly praise does who do have the energy for fighting that.

> some people find his aggressively dismissive style personally abusive and distressing.

Thank you for pointing this out.

There are many cases of what I call the "brilliant jerk" in programming.

Personally, I deal very badly with confrontational behavior. And it makes me rather sad. If I can deal with people by being friendly (or at least polite) and soft-spoken, it can't be that hard, now, can it?

And there are some examples of brilliant programmers that are also nice people and very pleasant to deal with. Richard Hipp of SQLite and Fossil seems to be this kind of person. If I cannot be as brilliant as him, at least I want to be as friendly and respectful as him.

It seems that a lot of software projects have begun adopting codes of conduct. I tend to feel a little ambivalent about this phenomenon, because it attempts to codify things I think should be the natural state of people interacting. But maybe in the long run, it is necessary to be a little more formal about this.

And still, when Bryan Cantrill gets sufficiently worked up about a subject, he is very entertaining to listen to.

Personally, I have a hard time favouring diversity and safe spaces over good software and solid architecture where the two goals compete. I'm also aware that the competitive streak in me pushes me to excel, and without it - without an element of technological one-upmanship in my personality - I'd be much less ambitious and I'd have achieved far less.

So overall I don't think Bryan is wrong, per se, to take the tack he does within the pool he plays in; it's just a pool for type-A personalities (in the system dev domain), and not the right place to play in if you're starting out, or are otherwise fragile. Build up your skin and chops in smaller ponds first. Stay out of them if you don't feel comfortable swimming there, because the discomfort of competition actually serves a purpose for those swimmers.

(Yes, some people can pursue and sustain excellence without the heat of competition. But not everyone is like that.)