And we wonder why the programmer geek/nerd/shut-in stereotype or whatever sticks. We fucking step all over eachother as a chance to look better. "Oh, look, some

And we wonder why the programmer geek/nerd/shut-in stereotype or whatever sticks. We fucking step all over eachother as a chance to look better. "Oh, look, someone wrote a helper function that does something I already know how to do." What's the benefit of calling that person out? Seriously. Answer that question before you take to a twitter mob. People through this thread argue whether its worth the time, but if it took Heather one hour to write it, the function paid for itself once she used it for an hour of work that would otherwise be spent crawing man pages. Hell, she says it was written a few years ago. Every piece of code I wrote two/three/four years ago can be looked at and often makes me cringe. You learn in time but that doesn't mean you should vanquish your mistakes. Grow from them, show them proudly as a statement of where you were and where you've come from. Whether you've evolved to a better programmer or not if that single function proved useful to you at one point it means that just one single person out there needed it. Does it make you wrong for not knowing/finding the tools it mimics? Maybe, but without someone beside her in the first place how should she have known. Perhaps taking to twitter with a knife for someone's back is a better start?