>> For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, bu

>> For a community that is so gate-kept through imaginary Internet points, there is an incredible amount of disrespect on the forums not through just voting, but also through people commenting, such as people passive-aggressively calling you dumb. >I don't see this as a passive aggressive calling the poster dumb, but rather an attempt at understanding the shape of the problem. If you are asking a question on SO, you probably lack the knowledge to understand why a person wouldn't want to use $whatever. So adding a simple contextual clarification ("Public fields are generally frowned upon, as they violate the OO encapsulation principle. So, why are your using public fields here?"). Because there is so much nuance lost in text, some people have (and I think rightly) come to understand that when statements or questions are directed at an individual, the more concise you are, the less respectful the statement or question is. Something like "I don't care enough about you to clarify my intent at all" The followup, where they say "use a decent IDE" presupposes that the person asking the question isn't. Indeed, this sentence here >You're making your own life (and the life of your coworkers) difficult (as shown by your question). reveals that we really shouldn't give this person the benefit of the doubt. If I was an e.g. wikipedia editor removing too much personal flair, the only sentence I'd keep is >This is anti-OO (encapsulation), doesn't respect standard practices, makes your code inconsistent, and unusable by all the standard frameworks and libraries which expect standard Java Beans conventions to be respected.