[munificent]

If you want to go out of your way to interpret things as uncharitably as possible, you'll find yourself missing out on a lot of potential wisdom.

Obviously, it's relevant if the language itself forces the user to worry about some pointless minutia. The problem is that the language created that relevance, when it is otherwise irrelevant to the problem the user is trying to solve.

Forward declarations are relevant in C because the program won't compile without them. But they aren't relevant in any meaningful way to any domain a user might be writing C programs for.

[movpasd]

> If you want to go out of your way to interpret things as uncharitably as possible, you'll find yourself missing out on a lot of potential wisdom.

Thank you for that line --- I may steal it :)

[munificent]

It's a thing that clicked for me several years ago and that I think about all the time now.

Our software engineer mindset tends to immediately put us in "criticize" mode and with social media comment threads, there's a tendency where a single correct critical observation leads people to discard an entire article.

But that's dumb. We should read critically, of course, but we should apply that in a finer-grained way so that we ignore the parts of an article that are wrong and try to learn from the parts that aren't.

There is often a lot of baby in that bathwater we are so quick to discard.