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Comment What part of "for example" can't you grasp? (Score 1) 1782

The majority of his article did not revolve around advocating *nix over Windows

Correct. I gave one clear, obvious example of a questionable conclusion he reached by drawing all of his "great hackers" from a very small and non-representative sample of the working programmers on Earth. This is why I prefaced the example with the phrase, "for example". Because it was an example. See?

Perhaps the phrase "platform advocacy" was ill-chosen; perhaps I should have said "platform and/or language and/or tool and/or whatever advocacy". Hell, I could've gone on for a whole paragraph clarifying a point which was painfully clear to anybody who'd read the essay.

You probably didn't notice that another of his points had to do with saying that cool programmers don't like Java. That's understandable. After all, how could could you possibly have noticed a little thing like that, in the middle of 1000+ Slashdot posts about precisely that aspect of his essay? Whether it caught your attention or not, it is, once again, platform and/or tool and/or language and/or blah blah blah advocacy.

Bottom line: He says that smart people all like the same stuff he does, and anybody who makes different choices is an idiot, and that's an important part of what he's saying. This is often called "platform advocacy". It's more often called "bullshit", but that term was too general for my purposes. There's a wealth of bullshit in Graham's essay, and I wanted to be clear about which particular steaming pile I was asking the reader to sniff.

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IBM Advanced Systems Group -- a bunch of mindless jerks, who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes... -- with regrets to D. Adams

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