I would like to point out that most extremism is from the perspective of the listener, not the speaker. If I just wrote a book or article called "Functional programming is great," there'd be plenty of people replying with "Oh, but what about MY favorite style? It's not that great! You're just being extreme!"
When the reality is that you can't take an opinion as the whole thought. But people do. Almost always. Regardless of the subject, people will think you're a fanatic for your position, no matter how temporary or experimental it is, unless you pay your dues in apologies and waffle terms.
> I would like to point out that most extremism is from the perspective of the listener, not the speaker.
Believe it or not, there is a significant contingent of crazy, death-threat-making jerks fixated on "The Unix Philosophy". As in, an experimental Unixy project[1] that made the rounds (including on HN) some years back and got a fair bit of attention. The project had a vision with scale similar to that of Atom, which is soaring on the front page today. But unlike Atom, this project was quietly dropped from public view because the author received a full blast of nutball hate from misguided Defenders of the Faith/Purity/Whatever.
I've been using, studying, and working with *nix systems basically forever (longer than almost everyone reading this). But that experience made me rather allergic to ever using or hearing "The Unix Philosophy". I realized that it's heavily overused as an argument-stopper: "that's not the unix way (so <EOF> off)." I've since witnessed similar language used in many projects, taken in whole context, as a dogmatic excuse rather than an actual source of architectural wisdom.
[1] Apologies for being deliberately vague. It's not my place to risk riling up the hate monsters vs. the creator of that project again. I'm still absolutely disgusted that Gamergate-level human insanity was leveled at someone putting forth what was, IMO, one of the most interesting Unix tooling experiments in the past decade.
