[DigitalJack]

Let's ignore political extremists for the moment.

I think the definitions of political conservative on Steve Yegge's post are pretty far wrong. If those are the commonly held beliefs among the liberal side, well, that seems like a stunning level of misunderstanding.

I think the only thing colloquially conservative about "conservatives" is that they are colloquially conservative in the amount of power the wish to cede to government.

Being a political conservative today in the US, in an ideal case at least, is about freedom and choice. Generally held beliefs are that free-markets are good in many cases, too much regulation is as bad and sometimes worse than too little, and that government is in very many cases a terribly inefficient use of resources.

In principle they do not believe in domination of the masses by a vast corpus of rigid rules. They believe a minimal set of overarching rules, and leaving much to freedom and choice.

That's conservatism in principle, from my view as a conservative. The reality of course is different, particularly for "conservatives" in office or seeking office. I personally have a hard time distinguishing one brand of politician from another.

And there are a vast array of people with sometimes bizarre beliefs that associate with one side or the other of the political spectrum, and the conservative side has plenty of them, and liberals do too.

I don't know for sure how this 'brand' of conservatism would apply to programming. I would suggest though, they would want as much freedom to express themselves as they could get.

So:

--The idea of strong typing would rub conservatives the wrong way.

--A rigid and inviolable set of rules and procedures and processes for how code may be written.

I'm not sure what else. My programming experience is pretty amateur. My favorite languages to work in are C, Python, and Clojure. So maybe that says something.

[sanderjd]

You are speaking exclusively of the fiscal side of the current use of the word "conservative", which currently makes no sense from the point of view of the non-political definition of the word "conservative", because it would take a fairly radical set of policy changes to achieve those goals. This is why "libertarian" is a much better word for that type of "conservatism" - it refers to the goals themselves, not to the amount of policy change necessary to achieve them. However, on the social side of modern "conservatism", it truly is about conserving status-quo in many cases, even when that approach is at odds with "freedom and choice", (gay marriage, drug laws, etc.)

tl;dr; Yegge's use of the word "conservative" is not wrong, but rather the use of the word "conservative" to describe the (usually exclusively-) fiscally libertarian portion of the modern "conservative" movement is wrong.

[DigitalJack]

Ok, I read more of Yegge's post and need to reply again:

There are definitely cases where the list of 9 software-conservative points should apply. These are the cases where bugs hurt or kill people... i.e. Software on airliners, software running important medical equipment, traffic signaling, etc...

I guess I was speaking from a less "mission critical" development point of view.