Yet some of the people singled out as the snarks in this article are people active in the community as teachers, participate to user groups, spend a lot of thei

Yet some of the people singled out as the snarks in this article are people active in the community as teachers, participate to user groups, spend a lot of their free time on maintaining beginner-oriented software. Life is best seen in shades of grey and I'm sure they sincerely regret having reacted that way. The more general issue is that Internet has become a place of competition and EXTREME negativity, just read any article on Hacker News if you need convincing. Some dude will spend months or years working on some shit, only to be greeted with cheers and claps like "wow, that sucks", "How is that useful?", "Your code is bad and you should feel bad", "LOL, you handled security like my 2-year old handles the TV remote". So no, it's not even a problem of calling out code when it's bad, it's just a simple matter of recognizing that those people you so hastily call out are in fact human beings. And NO ONE likes to be humiliated.