"This is a sign that the programming team — not some unrelated pinheads, but the five or six people who are supposed to be writing the code — have put strong, u

"This is a sign that the programming team — not some unrelated pinheads, but the five or six people who are supposed to be writing the code — have put strong, usable code last on their priorities. It comes behind marketing, behind ideology, and behind absurd identity politics." Ignore for a minute that Disapora may be a pathological case of this idea, in that their first release was apparently riddled with easily avoided security holes. In general, is this prioritizing of other concepts before code necessarily a bad thing? Code is important, but users generally do not care if your code is amazing or just acceptable. What matters to them are the concepts that are visible: things like how they feel while using it, what philosophy the application embodies, and aesthetics. I don't think it's wrong in general to prioritize your application's philosophy before its code, and I don't think the example the author gave is a pathological case of this idea either. It's a minor change to the code, but the idea of gender is massively important to users of the application. What do you think people will actually care and talk about: how rock solid the code on Facebook is, or the fact that they just made gender a text field? I think the author overreacted pretty badly in this case. Diaspora in general may have too low of a priority of on strong, usable code, but this was not the case that proved it. Nor is placing strong code low on your priorities list a bad thing.