In the last two days I saw two more examples where programmers on the internet were being jerks (for lack of a better term). In one case, someone wrote that a project needed to be documented better, and Jerk #1 wrote that in his opinion, the code probably needed to be more clear. Um, no, the first person was talking about documentation for newbies trying to learn about the project. That has nothing to do with code internals.
In the second case, a programmer shared some information that he had worked hard on, and Jerk #2 wrote, “Don’t you know about xzy?” It turned out that the first programmer did know about xyz, but that wasn’t even important. The point was that the jerk could have written his question much more kindly (such as, “Hey, do you know about xyz? If so, how does that fit in with your work?”).
As you can gather from these stories, both of the jerks were actually being lazy, and just fired off their comments without putting any thought or research into their statements, like they were saying, “Hey, I’m having a bad day, or I’m just a jerk, so here’s a thoughtless comment on your work.”
The moral of this little post is that (a) for some reason, some people in the world can be real jerks, and (b) don’t let the jerks get you down.
