Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd rather promote the writers who don't carry around a ton of wrong/distasteful baggage.
> ESR's political views call much of his work into question.
Presumably this question, whatever it is, can be answered by looking at his work. Do you think ESR's technical work and technical writings fail to stand up to scrutiny?
I don't really understand esr. I can't reconcile the elevated discourse of The Cathedral & the Bazaar and The Art of UNIX Programming with the constant self-praise and trolling in his blog and elsewhere. He's just too smart to be that way.
My instinct is to disagree with anyone who speaks in those tones, until I take time to really dissect what he said (and then disagree on better principles!).
I have a pretty negative opinion on ESR these days. I could find technical arguments about many aspects of his good pieces of writing, and much of his writing is not good. His abilities as a coder are not generally remarkable, either. But mostly I don't think he's a good person. I would probably not say "Don't read ESR", but I think it has to be "Read ESR* "
*but be aware that he's a polarizing figure and opinions of his merits differ
(and if you happen to have a differing opinion, please use the reply button instead of the downvote button)
I find his engineering approach interesting, if heretical. He seems to dislike scientists as they have no skin in the game:
"The focus is on an Engineering Approach – where
data are critical and there are consequences for
being wrong; not the Scientist approach – where a
theory is the product and it can be right or wrong
without repercussions."
The issue is that he is trying to solve an social problem via engineering, and in trying to simplify the problem, not spending enough time researching, and by "de emphasizing empathy" he takes a step backwards.
Basically, he sets forward incorrect assertions about biological differences without the self-awareness about why he takes those differences as truth. For instance "Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things". This is true at least in a very large part because women are socialized from birth to do so. There are dozens of similar examples.
The people unhappy with him are frustrated by always having to make the same damn argument to the same people who somehow think behavioral evolution is the end-all-be-all, as if somehow the computer they're typing on was a natural result of that evolution.
Now, in this particular case I don't think the author had any bad intent, and I think people who disagree should argue straightforwardly and use this as a great, clear opportunity to address the many people who actually do agree with this person but don't speak out. I also think the author has some good feedback when it comes to how dissenting opinions are heard on the left, but it's overshadowed by his lack of understanding of the more serious problem of bias and discrimination of women in tech. (yes, it is a more serious problem than conservatives being unable to express their views - at least they can choose to talk or not, even if I'd rather everyone be able to freely share their views)
Eric Scott Raymond, a very bright and often abrasive person.
Wrote Cathedral and the Bazaar, and was responsible for a lot of the realpolitik and branding that got Open Source to where it is today.
Had varying amounts of a hand in gpsd, ncurses, reposturgeon, and various other tools people actually use.
The big problem is that his worldview is exceptionally conservative culture war while at the same time being fairly social liberal. If something isn't productive to expanding Western Civilization (by his definition), for whatever reason, it must go. This includes Islam, this includes a lot of SJW theory, this includes homosexuals (not out of malice, but because they by definition can't make more population), and so forth.
He's quite interesting to read, and he makes very interesting points--unfortunately, if you have a visceral reaction to his politics it is quite hard to bear him.
He also has an annoying habit of claiming expertise and skills that aren't quite there, such as forensic critique of a police shooting.
"Interesting insufferable intellectual independent" would be my classification of him.
He severely misunderstands the relevant issues I think. Here is a much more focused and illuminating perspective, by someone who has never worked in tech no less:
I ran into one of his other posts here [1] that contains some similar anti-gems (I don't want to pick and choose out of context) that tell me he has a knack for selecting a subject and going at it completely sideways, missing most of the substance. I found his characterization of experienced engineers who choose not to focus on the latest fads extremely narrow-minded and ultimately, dead wrong. His 14 year-old up-to-date "kid" that can teach an experienced engineer "new tricks" is particularly amusing.
Sorry if you're getting downvoted a lot. We as a group need to start learning a little subtlety when it comes to condemning all of a person's contributions because we don't like their opinions or their actions. We are smart enough that we should be able to condemn ESR's idiotic words and actions and still praise his extremely important contribution to technology.
I think you are being downvoted because none of that matters. It sounds like Eric Raymond might be a horrible person (I really don't know) but it doesn't matter for the sake of technical discussion. Do his technical opinions and technical ideas work and further the state of the art?
If Jeffrey Dahmer, wrote a sorting algorithm that is 10% faster than the fastest sort algorithm it bears no relation to him being a murderer. The sorting algorithm stands on its own merits or doesn't.
Just discard these people's moral and political stances while keeping any good technical ideas they have.
It's not just that his knowledge is outdated, it's also that his philosophical principles will always take precedence over everything else, which includes sound and/or pragmatic technological decisions.
I'm not fond of esr in general but he's spot on with this post.
Your entire argument is just a thinly sourced (anti)appeal to authority argument. You can’t sum up a persons life experience from a short bio and their github history (most of mine is private for example)
If you don’t like specific ideas of his, attack them. But as a 30 year engineer whose managed teams as large as 40 people, while i don’t agree with everything he wrote, lots of it rings true to me.
> Unfortunately, this author seems like he is neither. He doesn't have the technical precision of an engineer, nor does he have the argumentative force of a philosopher. So we're left with "computer talk back so it smart."
Not only that, but if you were to choose a hill on which your career would die, the "computer talk back so it smart" would be one of the worst ones you could pick.
Read his excellent book Confessions. Because he criticizes unethical/corrupt engineering practices his enemies say he is bringing ill repute upon the profession and violating the terms of his license.
Oh good. I've had conversations on the internet with Richard Eng and he seemed like a reasonable human being, even if we disagreed on software. The name of the subject of the article made me do a double-take.
I'm torn, because while ESR did add a lot of emphasis on Unix/C culture (which is very important in hacker history), the last five or ten years he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.
The author obviously really dislikes his subject, Buckminster Fuller, but even accounting for some personal bias, the guy does sound like a bit of an idiot:
> he found the number pi distasteful. “I’d learned at school that in order to make a sphere, which is what a bubble is, you employ pi, and I’d also learned that pi is an irrational number. To how many places, I wondered, did frustrated nature factor pi? And I reached the decision right at that moment that nature didn’t use pi,” reads his objection in a New Yorker profile.
I'm afraid I must apologize for failing to make myself clear: it's that his practices call into question his statements in other areas.
I have to confess that I don't have specific instances at hand, for two reasons. One is that much of his more technical writing on programming is outside my own area of expertise. The other is that, given his tendencies, I largely ignore him.
My point, however, wasn't where he is specifically mistaken, but why the traits he exhibits in his rantings on other topics do have a bearing on his engineering judgement.
Unfortunately, the general zeitgeist of the times seems to be that a person's politics are somehow a litmus test for whether or not they should be listened to at all, about anything.
Normally this would just be a quirk, but the fact is that a lot of technical people here on HN and other places would happily throw the baby out with the bath water just because they disagree with somebody's politics.
It's stupid and unprofessional. With so many companies focusing on such technically boring problems, image management is perhaps legitimately more of a business concern than having the best tech available.
So, unfortunately, we have people with dissenting opinions but excellent work slandered or ostracized...even if their opinions are actually worth considering. Then again, that just means that those of us who are more genuinely tolerant will have an edge during hiring. :)
Also, on ESR in particular:
You have to understand that, rightly or wrongly, his worldview is long-term Culture War. Literally anything which prevents The Right People from breeding faster (homosexuality) or defending themselves (attacks on the 2nd amendment) or arguing (kafkatraps) is suspect. Because he's playing for keeps, he'll do whatever it takes (including, perhaps, being less than perfectly equal in presentations on things) to further his agenda. That's just how it is, and it doesn't reflect on his technical contriubtions or aptitude at all.
Hell, the bitch of it is, he's even arguably correct on some of his cultural points, if he himself (much less his detractors) didn't spend so much time sounding so disagreeable and grumpy and wingnutty.
Anyways, it's just a sign of the times, as I said. It seems that most people are unable to handle a mental model which accounts for biased or unreliable narrators while still allowing the work of those narrators to be taken advantage of.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
Now, his attitudes on HIV denialism and IQ and race don't deal with engineering, but they're pretty objectionable. And, you know, we can get good engineering writing and thinking from a lot of places. ESR doesn't have a monopoly on writing about operating systems. I'd rather promote the writers who don't carry around a ton of wrong/distasteful baggage.
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