I always get the feeling the ranter is just an average programmer who want to remind everyone how they're so much better than the worst. I can't imagine a really great programmer wasting his time doing a rant like this about programmers who get everything wrong consistently.
The worst offender in this category is probably Jeff Atwood.
Yes, we're surrounded by a sea of bad code. Much of which comes from bad programmers, many of whom will never accept that they are bad. That's a banal observation.
What isn't banal? An example of a beautiful thing. There are lots of problems that are still awaiting their beautiful solution. If you want to promote beautiful code, publish some. Or, find some code you think is un-beautiful, improve it, and publish that. Teach people how to make such things. Show, don't tell.
It doesn't matter what the personalities of other programmers are like. What matters is the product. Critique the product.
Commentary: It sounds like the difference between a Real Programmer and a good hacker is skill, documentation and math/data structures/algorithims. I can't remember which essay it was in but pg recommended always doing things the hard way because if it even occured to you to do things the hard way, it's probably because you can see a benefit from it already, and it makes it much harder for competitors to catch up if you do this consistently.
Huh? This is the second blatantly anti-Ruby post from this blog in less than a week. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they had an axe to grind...
Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.
Maybe they do now, in this decadent era of Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software but back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code...
Year 1983.
