alt Hacker NewsMost well known Dijkstra, who it can safely be said, is one of the greats. Though this blog post is a little much with the whole elite thing there is a little much, I think a rather terrible attitude that is antithetical to it is that of 'Democratization' which seeks to strip skill and need to learn from building and interacting with technology often at the expense of many positive attributes. It hates any thing that requires skill or simply prior learning to use well despite often these things meaning the system overall can better serve the user better and one the prior work has been done is more effective.
Further this 'Democritisation' can be seen as trying to deskill something that taking away many positives and having contempt for skill. I believe This is often simply to devalue software developers and I assume you are one so I believe we should both be cautious of this devaluation.
I think a more interesting question would be why should we not have elite's and I don't know if I am unusual but false humility always rubs me the wrong way?
Some thoughts in no particular order:
1. FWIW, the older I get the larger a fraction of EWDs I disagree with.
2. If you take something wrong and reverse it you are usually left with something wrong.
3. Many of the language features that were cited as making lisp "elite" when I was a kid exist in Javascript. Lexical closures were treated like some mysterious thing that you need to study on a mountaintop and become enlightened to get are now used daily by workady front-end programmers.
4. Democratization isn't necessarily about deskilling, it's about making skills accessible to more people.
5. Having and celebrating those who are elite is good. "X is only for elites" is bad.
6. Literally nobody in my 3rd grade class had any issue programming in a dialect of lisp in the computer lab. Certainly some were better than others, but I wouldn't call something that even half the population can do as "for elites only"