September 25, 2009, 1:44 PM — Popular stereotypes of programmers caricature socially-maladroit, emotionally-immature, young men.
There are reasons for the generalizations. Individuals can always choose to transcend them, of course, and it's timely to mention Miguel de Icaza's decision on how to respond to recent remarks attributed to Richard Stallman. Stallman is a high-profile programmer who helped code an earlier generation of such important applications as emacs, as well as the original GNU Public License. De Icaza also has a distinguished record of code production, focused largely on GNOME and MONO.
Stallman is notorious for outbursts of severe criticism of some who fall short of his standards over a domain which ranges widely beyond programming. It's no surprise that he used the word "traitor" in talking about de Icaza. More interesting is de Icaza's response, which emphasizes, as much as possible, opportunities to improve software, rather than dissipate emotional energy.
Also inspiring is Python's recent struggle with diversity. While the focus of such community leaders as the Python Software Foundation and organizers of Python conferences worldwide remain focused on the language and its use, there's growing sentiment that better results, in a meaningful sense of "better", will follow shift of a little effort to "diversity" initiatives such as encouragement of women to attend PyCons, or translation of documentation to a wider span of human languages.
Successful coders analyze and design how best to achieve the application goals their imaginations put before them. The wisest among them apply the same techniques when they aim at human and civic targets.
