I think it's just as well not to allow comments on one's site. If someone wants to say something about something you've written, they can say it on their own blog or on Twitter. When it's something of theirs they're writing on instead of something of yours, they think twice before being jerks: most people won't create a whole blog post just to make a trollish comment, and someone whose Twitter stream is a series of nasty remarks is not going to have a lot of followers, unless he's very witty.<p>Unfortunately, although I don't have comments on my site, as the moderator of a forum I get them <i>de facto</i> in the comments threads here. It's a uniquely unpleasant situation. In a way it's worse than having comments on my site. On my own site I could delete nasty comments, but here if I do I'll be accused of censorship.<p>Frankly, I'm stumped. I've occasionally thought of banning paulgraham.com, but people would accuse me of censorship if I did that too.
%99 of the time, Joel-style posts about programming in general are a boring rehash of ideas already expressed better before (often by Joel himself). Same goes for "10 things every start up should know" etc. They're great for HN karma, poor as reading material.<p>Blog posts about <i>actual</i> programming, as in "here's how I implemented x" are almost always a great read, and if they are really good they will sustain their value for a long time and reach far beyond the blog's readership as they start appearing in Google searches etc.<p>It's all about signal vs noise. You may have a great insight, but if Joel/37 Signals/Coding Horror/etc already wrote about it you're just adding more noise.
Maybe it's relative to what other audiences you also encounter, but I haven't found things too bad in the programming blogosphere. Sure, there are jerks, but there are jerks everywhere. My day-job is in academia, and there are a <i>lot</i> of jerks at academic conferences. You're more likely to get someone furious that you're intruding on their area, or critical that you aren't using their preferred methodology or citing their papers, than you are to get someone genuinely interested in understanding what you're doing and why. I actually sometimes find the tech-blog reception friendlier, on the occasions I've ventured some of my academic work online.<p>Admittedly, it might be worse if I were a celebrity blogger with tons of readers; when only relatively few people read you, generally it's only people who have some reason to like your work that would bother commenting.
I don't blog about programming for different reasons...<p>I find that any <i>really</i> interesting programming problem is too complex to be reduced to prose in a form digestible in someone's 10-minute blog break. Yeah, I could post about the umpteenth-zillion Sudoku solver, or about this tricky Haskell problem I solved - but if it's general enough to be broadly interesting, it's too shallow to be enlightening, and if it's deep enough to be useful, it's probably too specific to have a widely interested readership. Worse, I feel that by participating in the blogosphere, I'm deluding myself into thinking that these information soundbites are worth anything, and taking up my attention with little factoids that distract me from getting actually interesting work done.<p>I find that the value of writing about programming is in the "Why?" and the "Roads not taken" of software systems. So I keep a development journal of my personal projects. At the very least, it keeps me from revisiting design decisions I've already decided. But this doesn't need to be public to serve its purpose, and I've found that making it public anyway is too distracting to maintain forward momentum on the projects. Instead, I open things up after the project has succeeded or failed, like I did with Diary of a Failed Startup and like I'll hopefully do with this programming language I'm developing. No, it's not the ego boost that constant, instantaneous feedback gives you - but that ego boost becomes a drug that keeps you from functioning when people (as the article points out) turn on you, as they inevitably do.
I'd say it's not worthwhile to write about programming if people already have high expectations for you. Spolsky is definitely well-known and some people probably view him as somewhat full of himself, so they like to pick out <i>anything</i> that might hurt his image.<p>For the average joe schmoe programmer, people don't have such expectations, so there is far less negative reaction. Also, personality <i>does</i> play a huge role. Someone who doesn't seem too aloof and distant from other people will be better off (take _why for example).
Although my evidence is only anecdotal, it seems like a lot of the programmers who are constantly argumentative and the biggest flamers are loners who in some cases have never even worked in a team environment.
<i>"... He has outlasted the relevance of all of them. His first articles would have been frontpaged on whatever came before Slashdot. ..."</i><p>Not quite true. Slashdot is from about '96 and JOS is from about 1999-2000. Could the real reason be a bit simpler as suggested Joel is running out of new ideas? Is it possible the upcoming IPO might also play part?<p><i>"... I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming. ..."</i><p>And all loose out. Has this kind of negative feedback held people back from conversing in past times?
I disagree. Although my blog is currently down (software issues that I have put off fixing for wayyy too long), I am going to continue to write about programming. Something that really annoys me is how many programmers don't know how to program. Sitting around on social news sites telling everyone how dumb they are doesn't fix the problem, but teaching people how to program <i>does</i>.<p>I try to do that through writing, and I'd like to think that I've been moderately successful. I sold a few copies of my programming-related book, and many people have met me at conferences and have told me how my blog helped them in some way. It's helped people get over the fears of learning Emacs Lisp, it's helped people start using object databases, it's helped people realize that library code is just like the code they write, and that they can just start contributing! These are all things that make me happy, and knowing that I am helping push other people in this direction makes me even happier. All this by just being instructional and mostly "unbiased"; not every piece of writing that influences someone has to be filled with argumentative rhetoric. (I found out early on that "my $foo is better because $bar" just makes people mad. So I try to write "here's how $foo works" and let people make their own decision. This results in a lot less hate, although I admit that I can't resist writing a good piece of flamebait now and again. It makes me feel good if only one person agrees, and it makes me feel good when someone who I've never met thinks its worth his time to tell me to "die in a fire". Who says I'm not mentally ill?)<p>Anyway, I think writing about programming is highly worthwhile -- both for the author, and the wider "programming community". I'm not going to stop, and I'm not going to miss Joel.
In the egalitarian listserv world that I frequent, programmers generally are extremely helpful, more patient than necessary, and write remarkably good prose. Perhaps because jerks like to comment on blogs because doing so doesn't have ramifications in a repuation based ecosystem in which there is less asymmetry. It is easy and safe to bad mouth the gods, not so in the assembly...
He didn't say it's not worthwhile, on the contrary, Marco laments the loss to programmers and tech writing. What he said is that for him it's not worth the risk of putting himself out there:<p><i>Some people claim that they don’t care and that they can ignore it. I don’t know if Joel can. I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming.</i>
Nice article and the lessons apply to mathematicians as well. Few mathematician are willing to engage in civil meta-mathematical discourse and usually all such discussions end up in a shouting match about the intellectual inferiority of whoever is involved.
I have to agree with the writers estimation of the programming audience. I have noticed a very similar negative trend even among HN users, with comments on my programming themed blog tending to be generally positive with a few negative replies, while comments on HN on the same articles tend to be generally negative with a few positive replies.<p>We programmers probably tend to nitpick a bit more than your average audience, and that isn't always a bad thing. It can't be all that encouraging to the writers though.
As far as I'm concerned this is just another piece of opinion put online by a programmer. That's not a bad thing - putting things out there and talking about them is integral to the programming profession as a whole. Look at the body of writing work out there written by programmers that's considered 'classic' already. Never mind that most of the discussion is usually subjective, highly opinionated, often misinformed and abrasive, insulting or abusive.<p>Anything that is out there for the public to comment on is subjected to this. Just take that as a given, this is what you get when you make public comments. People not being nice on the internet is just a fact of life. That doesn't immediately devalue what you're saying. There are plenty of people out there who don't read or write commentary and read postings on their merit.<p>Not writing in public just because people might say nasty things about you or your writings seems wrong to me.<p>Also, VI rocks! Down with Emacs! Yeah! Screw your non-modal editors!
Well maybe I live in another world but I think more or less the opposite. You can write about programming and people will love it, and in our industry there are a great deal of people that are at the same time not gross and with good arguments. But...<p>there are many ways to write about programming: one is to <i>actually</i> write about programming, that is, posts containing some experience to share about some technology, or a pattern one writer noticed about programming languages that is interesting, or how to implement such algorithm in a better way, or just this-is-how-I-made-this-stuff and so forth. People tend to love this stuff, if you search the HN / progreddit / slashdot archives.<p>Then there is another way to write about programming: the speculation. A few well known blogs really master this art, as they are able to run successful programming blogs <i>for years</i> without actually ever really writing about programmings. In this blogs you'll find a mix about obvious things narrated in an inspirational way, a few rants about why people should do A instead of B, and so forth.<p>My impression is that the latter kind of blogs, not really designed to share what you think, but more to think about what you could share to be interesting and cool, are the ones more often subject to criticisms.
Programmer critics can be very difficult, often just as difficult and insulting as the unintelligent critics. However, I find the ignorant people are usually worse and more frequent and are there just to troll or make shocking remarks without even trying to backup with logic. I have seen programmer critics get really bad, nitpicking everything. It's like they have no lives or respect at the worst, trashing everyone like they are smartest in the cosmos.
For quite a while now, I really did feel that Joel has run out of things to say and stopped reading him. So this comes as no surprise (and no loss). His books are still good reads though. Wisdom is also something that is subject to evolution I guess.
Anecdote:<p><i>I</i> write about programming, and it is entirely worthwhile for me. I changed my style of writing at a certain point, but that had more to do with what I wanted to explore than with whether people were critical.<p>Speaking of which, lots of people have said critical things about my writing. But lots more said nice things. Overall, I feel that I get far more positive feedback than negative. I could be wearing rose-coloured glasses.<p>So... My experience differs from the author. But that makes sense, we are different people.
Comments are disproportionately critical and/or argumentative, but that's because it's a waste of bandwidth to post a comment saying, "I agree!" That's what the up-arrow is for.