Congratulations on fomenting that impostor syndrome.
While the the text contains valid anti-patterns its
style is non-helpful. People should not be put down but encouraged. People will notice sooner or later if they are not fit for a field by themselves. The only benefit of berating someone for lack of skills is a temporary catharsis for the one doing the berating while the person at the other end pays a psychological cost of a kind or another unless he's really mindful.
Berating command-voice is excusable in a heated argument but maintaining this voice throughout a long writing is stylistically a very poor choice, IMO. This just discredits the authors voice as that of an infantile jerk.
The problem is the article contains actually useful advice for newbie/intermediate programmers, but it is framed in such a way it mostly appeals to experienced programmers with a superiority complex.
If you're experienced but not superior, you haven't been learning anything from your mistakes along the way. I thought the article was extremely nostalgic. An experienced programmer who can't spin up a funny story about the time he learned his lesson about bounds checking or implementing regexs the hard way is either not really an experienced programmer, or what is known as a "liar", or most politely has an extremely bad memory.
As a concrete example of #2 poor understanding of the programming model, in the old days we had a saying that you can write fortran in any language, and it was not exactly a compliment. I guess a modern politically correct analogy would be the ability to write perl in any language. Any programmer who hasn't made the mistake of writing code style from their language X in their new language X+1 is either inexperienced or outright lying or at best is merely forgetful of doing it.
The article is poorly formed in that the phases explanation from the second "programming model" discussion actually applies to the entire article, with most of the article being examples of "phase 1". If you're at "phase 0" it could be helpful to see a roadmap, and if you're at a higher phase its going to be somewhat nostalgic.
""Bad programmer" is also considered inflammatory by some who think I'm speaking down to them. Not so; it was personal catharsis from an author who exhibited many of those problems himself. And what I think made the article popular was the "remedies"--I didn't want someone to get depressed when they recognized themselves, I wanted to be constructive."
Which I think is fair enough.
Besides which, there's plenty of feel-good 'you can do it!' material out there. Some of us prefer a more vigorous pep-talk.
Frankly, my impostor reflexes were far more triggered by the 'interviewing is broken' posts on here in the last couple of days; I've got two literary degrees and a big vocabulary. I interview well, despite the fact that I know (counts) two algorithms. I am haunted by the idea that it was my vocabulary that got me hired, and not my engineering potential.
While the the text contains valid anti-patterns its style is non-helpful. People should not be put down but encouraged. People will notice sooner or later if they are not fit for a field by themselves. The only benefit of berating someone for lack of skills is a temporary catharsis for the one doing the berating while the person at the other end pays a psychological cost of a kind or another unless he's really mindful.
Berating command-voice is excusable in a heated argument but maintaining this voice throughout a long writing is stylistically a very poor choice, IMO. This just discredits the authors voice as that of an infantile jerk.