welcome to the stick factory

Sometimes you take a little time out of your vacation to spend an afternoon with a friend scratching an itch for the collective group.

Sometimes this is more of an exploration, an attempt to learn more about the problem and employ techniques that might lessen pain in the future and solve a variety of problems in the same domain.

Sometimes someone else fixes the specific problem, reads a blog entry of your friend and then digs up some fine quotes in the blogosphere to bludgeon your co-conspirator over the head.


Nice stick.


Sometimes we've had a bad day and just want to righteously wail on something or someone.

Enter the handy stick. Like pythonic. Or YAGNI or DRY or KISS or RTFM or the idea that "less code is better". or whatever your favorite XP whip is. or in this case, that frameworks suck (just like everything else).

From the perspective of personal practice, these are all important ideas, and used in the correct context, result in better code. They can act as a sort of flashlight for illuminating new ways of thinking about things. These new ways of thinking about things frequently benefit those who adopt them, hence their popularity.

Applied loosely in a public forum, these fine phrases or concepts, married with a link or two, can satisfylingly polarize conversations, completely erase any meaningful dialogue and summon waves of stop energy from all those who may not understand the actual nuts and bolts of the debate, but respond positively to the buzzmemes used.

In this context, they are statements of culture, banners of association, not of use to constructively solving the problems that have evoked the discourse in the first place.

goodbye nuance and feedback. hello dogma.

thwap. end of conversation.