People here are very critical of Jeff Atwood. I realize that he has some shortcomings, and is sometimes flat-out wrong about things, but I'd like to point out a couple of things in his defense:
1. His blog and podcasts are pretty entertaining, even if he is wrong sometimes.
2. He created Stack Overflow, which is a pretty nice site. At least, I like it.
3. He admitted and blogged about an extremely embarrassing oversight on his part today. Which takes some backbone.
That being said, I don't think we need a link to him on every single blog entry. This particular entry is more interesting from a Hacker News perspective though.
I'm one of those who is often critical of Atwood, and the point is not that he is "wrong sometimes", but rather, that a) he tends to carelessly dismiss those things he doesn't understand, and b) this includes much of the discipline of computer science.
As Dennis Forbes so aptly put it, "Be careful diving in [to CodingHorror] headfirst, though, as the technical depth is generally so shallow you'll be hitting the bottom before you've even broken through the surface tension."
Interesting. I was about to impulse-comment on a previous comment, but then say yours.
Makes me wonder about the ways of being wrong, and who do people here think tend to be wrong in a good or valuable way?
E.g., making conjectures that at least posit novel interaction of events and ideas, or are wrong due to lack of current knowledge and over-optimistic conjecture, not because of willful ignorance or bias.
(I suppose that describes any good sci-fi writer; I'm thinking more of bloggers or essayists.)
1. Entertaining but often wrong in subtle ways that could confuse a novice programmer. As an example see his opinion the need to know C.
2. Yes, much better then experts exchange.
3. He does that often, make mistakes and then boldly admit to them. The last one I remember was his article on password salting. Yes, that's good but then again what choice does he have, you can't erase your past from the internet.
That being said, this particular entry is a tease to the NEXT entry where we might learn something valuable about security.
I'd prefer if we saw many, many fewer coding horror articles here because I do believe the interests of his fans and those of elite hackers are mutually exclusive.
People are very critical of Jeff because it's very easy to be critical of him. Not that it's necessarily justifiable; it's just that "everyone else is doing it". It's kind of like the old maxim about how nobody every got fired for going with IBM / Microsoft.
He's done some good things, and some stupid things; I think a lot of people have probably gotten started reading up online on their own because of Coding Horror, and anything that gets the 9-to-5 set doing some extracurricular reading can't be all bad.
Its totally the other way around, Jeff coded most of the StackOverflow site, sometimes in the podcast you can notice Jeff knows more about their codebase than Joel.
I'm also an Atwood fan. And he may have been pretentious in this particular post, but I find that for the most part he is quick to admit when he's wrong or lacking knowledge on a topic. He seems eager to learn.
Really? Like when? When he blames Wikipedia for his misunderstanding of P=NP? When complains like a little school girl that it's not his fault he doesn't know what "begging the question" means? Is he that eager to learn when he constantly bemoans how pointless it is to learn C or know anything about how computers actually work, save for when he fawns over a select few Turing award winners for whom he doesn't even understand the work of? Maybe you're right.
Well, someone keeps posting these things on HN! This is always a weak criticism: "How can you criticize something you know a lot about." It's actually kind of silly.
just stop reading him if it bother you a lot... for me you're not seeing all his articles objectively, since you criticize pretty much all codinghorror articles.
ALL of his blog posts are about extremely embarrassing oversights on his part -- they're all about what an idiot he is. The punchline is always "the first third of this post was hopelessly stupid".
They all have an implied "why the fuck do you listen to me anyway?" tone in the final paragraph. Jeff Atwood knows, deep in his heart, just how much of a pretender he is.
1. His blog and podcasts are pretty entertaining, even if he is wrong sometimes.
2. He created Stack Overflow, which is a pretty nice site. At least, I like it.
3. He admitted and blogged about an extremely embarrassing oversight on his part today. Which takes some backbone.
That being said, I don't think we need a link to him on every single blog entry. This particular entry is more interesting from a Hacker News perspective though.