One thing I asked myself after I wrote that comment was how I would feel if I had been on the receiving end. I think there would have been two reactions.
First, I would have had the sort of anger and upset reaction that would have come with someone describing my code as "looking like it was written by a poor programmer". I'm sure that I would have wanted to lash out at that person.
But that reaction would have quickly been replaced with deep shame that my code had been examined by someone and found to be very poor. Once I had examined the code I would have felt very bad because I had put something out there of that quality.
The irony is that had he actually contributed significant amounts of code to the larger open source projects, he'd be used to this sort of criticism. Hell hath no fury like a maintainer's scorn. Incidentally, I think that's why developers in the major open source projects tend to generally be pretty good: the commit crappy code, get flamed, fix, commit-cycle tends to be instructive.
First, I would have had the sort of anger and upset reaction that would have come with someone describing my code as "looking like it was written by a poor programmer". I'm sure that I would have wanted to lash out at that person.
But that reaction would have quickly been replaced with deep shame that my code had been examined by someone and found to be very poor. Once I had examined the code I would have felt very bad because I had put something out there of that quality.