[nathias]

Elitism is usually meant as an insult for snobs pretending to have better tastes than anyone else. This is wrong because in questions of taste there can be no criteria other than subjective taste, however in contexts where there are objective criteria of quality elitism is just being a professional good at his job. When you open up a horrible spaghetti codebase that's inconsistent in style and full of nonsensical abstractions with 90% of bloat you should feel digust. Of course all bad code has a reason behind it, some more justified than others, but no reason should ever make a bad codbase feel good.

[michaelt]

> however in contexts where there are objective criteria of quality elitism is just being a professional good at his job.

Imagine I look at the Linux kernel source code and I feel it's lacking in automated integration tests, and that C is a poor choice of language for security-critical code.

Am I a competent professional, applying objective quality criteria?

Or am I an arrogant dilettante, to imagine I know better than some of the most influential living programmers?

[nathias]

It depends on you and the context, are you actually working on Linux kernel and have worked on a lot of similar type projects?

Objectivity does not imply that it's easy to discern adequate criteria or that they are easy to know or that there is a consensus about them, just that it isn't purely subjective, and code isn't.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Tell Linus his code sucks.

That should end well.

[thefaux]

Linus has a terrible attitude.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

That may be so (I think so, myself), but there's no arguing with his prowess.

He was annoyed at his options for configuration management, so he took a couple of weeks off, and wrote Git[0].

Now, that kind of skill doesn't come in a Cracker Jack box...

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/10-years-of-git-an...