Comment by krylon

> 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.