Let's stay classy HN.
This was a very ugly moment of what seems to be a very ugly story. We should learn from it and try to avoid situations like this in the future. I'm sorry things like this happened and that they continue happening all over the place with people less vocal and with blogs less popular than Zed.
Zed... After reading this a long time ago, I was afraid when you approached the Python community. I feared something like this would happen again and I expressed my concern publicly. I am happy you proved my fears unfounded.
But, still, we can apologize, try to understand each other and learn from our experiences.
As for my credibility in technical matters, well I do make stuff people use, but more importantly I make stuff that helps other people be awesome. That's my niche.
While there might be great rail programmers who know there CS basics. A lot don't
In my experience I find that nearly all practicing programmers simply don't know a lot of important basics about building software or even how a computer works.
Or much worse: have heard, can answer questions about them, and still can't code themselves out of a paper bag.
Rails is a niche that has a low barrier to entry. I doubt you can write an article that says: High frequency trading is a ghetto.
Fair disclosure: I'm an engineer (I was trained to build computers instead of programming them). I've been programming professionally since 1987 and, among the top programmers I've met since then, two biologists, one engineer, one physicist, one ichthyologist and several ones who never graduated college, figure prominently.
For example, no one seems to say, "Oh I was there, and the situation was way overblown. ThoughtWorks was kidding, never serious w/ its intimidation. And offering a junior sysadmin job to a real programmer applying to Google is just a starting point. It's not because of a screwed up corp. hiring process."
