I just loved this essay about banning “feigned surprise”, a pretty common response in the programming universe.
“Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t even know about monads?”) is a method of belittling someone and lording your superiority over them.
As a writer, I try to assume that anything that might be puzzling to me might be puzzling to the reader. A piece of information that I find interesting and, at least at some point in the recent past, was new to me, might be new and interesting to the reader. That new information is a gift to me, one that I absolutely love to share with the reader. Feigned surprise is the enemy of that gift.
Here’s a link to hacker school, mentioned in the linked essay, in case you are interested.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1053/
This behavior is not unique to programmers.
My response to that shit tends to be “No, asshole, I don’t. Hence my asking you about it. Now, are you going to help me learn, or stand there waving your dick in my face?”
I never run into that behavior, fortunately.
Hey, John – I assume you’re aware that your old domain 403s on load, right? Or is it just me?
(Just sayin’ – I don’t recall a “I’m shutting down my website” notice there, and one day it just stopped loading… and obviously since you’re commenting here you didn’t get hit by a bus.)
Bet you didn’t know that 15 minutes could save you 15% on your car insurance