Comment by gordian-mind

Reading this, I kept wondering whether it would stay on the technical level or whether it would immediately start broadcasting the author’s cultural politics. It does, and the first giveaway is the kind of sentence you’ve seen a thousand times:

“These days, however, we write increasing amounts of complicated, unsecure code to express less and less meaning, in order to infinitely generate shareholder value.”

That line signals a tribe: “infinitely generate shareholder value” is the ritual incantation that turns every topic into the same morality play, with the same stock villain. It’s the worldview of someone who wants to live in a small enchanted technical garden, treating the economic world as a gross external thing, that you can blame whenever you need a cause.

And “unsecure code” in that context is part of the aesthetic: modernity is decadent, business is corrupting, therefore the code is “unsecure” and “meaningless.”

The Brendan Eich stuff is the same genre: petty culture-war residue kept alive long after normal people moved on.

So yeah, the internet continues, and until such artistic types learn to tamp down their own biases and refrain from injecting those into every word they write, I will keep away from their walled gardens.