This article brings to mind the challenge of enforcing empathy in an engineering community. Software and other technical systems are coldly precise and unambigu

This article brings to mind the challenge of enforcing empathy in an engineering community. Software and other technical systems are coldly precise and unambiguous. People, on the other hand, are rarely that precise and often illogical without significant effort/investment into forcing themselves to be rigorous about a though or claim. I think it's too easy for community members to leave opinionated outsiders with a bad taste in their mouth when they approach your system with opinions and tendencies that were built up in other systems with different circumstances and assumptions. The kneejerk response is "well, you're wrong, we don't do it that way here," hence the dogma. It takes serious effort to fight that instinct, and not everyone is good at fighting it... especially when some community members suffer from the same problem as the outsider, but with the affinity being toward their own system. This is a hard problem to solve... It's a good thing this article was written and there is a willingness to at least acknowledge the problem in the Go community. It contrasts to the style of say, Linus Torvalds, whose approach is basically "empathy? fuck that, I'd rather call them names" :-)