[drewcrawford]

> the difference between sports and politics is that sports don't really matter

I have some news for you. The sports industry is something like $400bn. If the Lakers have a bad night or whatever, it matters.

You may not understand why moving players around a field matters, but it seems to me that this is roughly the same sort of ignorance that would be behind the view that pushing pixels around a screen "doesn't matter". The fact that X is a hundred billion dollar industry is primate facie evidence that it is important. You may not want it to matter but this is a different thing than determining whether or not it actually does.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that there is a certain sentiment of "silly other people, stop being bad!" that easily occurs in these conversations. The TDD debate sounds important for cars but .001% of engineers are working on the self-driving cars. Most software is mundane and these debates are 99.9% academic and are even had in the abstract without affecting any tangible software at all! In many ways, the hacker arguments are far more tribal and less practical than anything going on in sports or politics.