I posted that article to HN, but it didn't get any votes. I know very little about Clojure, but I think the conservative/liberal dichotomy he describes is very

I posted that article to HN, but it didn't get any votes. I know very little about Clojure, but I think the conservative/liberal dichotomy he describes is very real. Liberalism and conservativism in software are closely related to liberalism and conservativism in politics. The description of conservativism in that quote is not terribly insightful, because he's obviously going out of his way not to offend anybody, so he made it excessively simple and superficial. To get a good handle on how conservativism manifests itself in software, ideally you'd need a subtle appreciation of how it manifests itself in politics; less in terms of dry theory and more in terms of the character traits and basic orientation toward life that precede adopting conservative views. Yegge speculates that someone could be a liberal in software and a conservative in politics or vice versa, but I kind of doubt this. If it does occur, it's probably in borderline cases, or in cases where somebody may be truly a conservative deep down, say, but is not engaged enough in politics to have realized it yet, or they side with the left politically as a result of specific issues rather than temperament (e.g. the person is a racial minority). You could say that conservatives, both in software and politics, tend to be sticklers for rules and structure. That may be enough to shed some light on the difference as a practical matter. But I think that doesn't really get to the essence. Liberals can also be for rules and structure. What differs is the nature of the rules and who they apply to. I think it's closer to the truth to say that conservatives generally distrust people. In politics this general distrust manifests as, e.g. opposition to social welfare programs, because of the belief that people will invariably take advantage and abuse them. In software, the distrust manifests as, e.g. opposing programming languages and language constructs that are too laid-back and give the programmer too much freedom. The belief is that programmers, in general, can't be trusted to make good choices, and will invariably write bad code if they're allowed to.