[mwfunk]

That's just geek one-upsmanship, it's not commentary. Geek A says that he really admires Geek Icon A. Geek B denigrates Geek A by telling him that Geek Icon A didn't really do anything, that he was just standing on the shoulders of the slightly more obscure but infinitely more talented Geek Icon B. This makes Geek B sound smart and informed, or at least it it makes Geek B feel smart and informed and better the Geek A.

Geek C comes along and tells Geek B that he's clueless, because Geek Icon B was just a poseur who spent his career harvesting the intellectual fields that had been plowed and sown by the even more obscure Geek Icon C. And so on, ad infinitum.

I halfway expect someone else to stumble on that thread and inform the author that he's an idiot because he doesn't realize that Dennis Ritchie is no more than a pimple on John McCarthy's back (not my opinion, just the sort of binary thinking and argumentation that I've observed in these types of threads).

It's also an example of geek self-importance: the idea that the only thing that matters is writing code. It reduces the value of anyone involved in the creation of a piece of hardware or software who wasn't writing code or soldering stuff to nil. People say this stuff to feel better about themselves at the expense of other people that they feel get too much credit. There's some truth to it, of course, but it's rarely expressed as a gray area. It usually comes in the form of, "hey, you know that guy who everyone thinks did everything? Really, he did NOTHING! Nothing at all. This other guy that most people never heard of did EVERYTHING." Which is just as intellectually dishonest as the idea that the first guy did everything.