NaNs Just Don't Get No Respect

[Peter Alexander]

On Saturday, 18 August 2012 at 03:03:23 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Why aren't my friends that work or study chemistry writing free 
> small online articles like my programmer&CS friends do? Maybe 
> it's systematic differences in their brain brain? Or it's just 
> more easy to talk about coding compared to botany and chemistry 
> and making engines? Or maybe programmers don't know what they 
> are doing? Or maybe it's just I am not looking in the right 
> places? :-)

I'd also like to know this.

Maybe it's just the size of the audience. There's a very large 
community of programmers online, but the community of chemists 
and botanists is not so large, so there's less reason to share 
online.

Maybe it's because programming is so accessible, allowing 
younger, more opinionated people to share their thoughts. It's 
easy to achieve something in programming: just download a 
compiler/interpreter, follow some online tutorials and you'll 
have something worth sharing. In Chemistry on the other hand, you 
really need to go to university before you can start doing 
something beyond simple experiments with household ingredients.

Maybe it's a delusion of grandeur. A lot of programmers have the 
idea that they could program up the next big computer game, or 
make the next Facebook or Twitter. When they inevitably fail, 
they turn to blogging ("Those who can't, teach"). I've noticed 
this especially on HackerNews, which is of course filled with 
people with such delusions. P.S. before anyone gets offended, I'm 
not suggesting this applies to all programming bloggers!

Maybe it's related to the tendency for programmers to be 
libertarians, which would also explain the whole open source 
software movement. They want to share knowledge freely, and 
online articles would be part of that.

Maybe it's related to the religion thing. Programmers tend to be 
religious about their languages and practices, and are often 
challenged on their beliefs, so they'll tend to want to preach 
their ideas to the masses. This reason likely explains this 
particular article: there was disagreement on the use of NaNs for 
initialisation, so Walter wanted to express his take on the 
matter to the masses. I have done similar things in the past, 
e.g. blogging about my thoughts on immutable in D.

Maybe it's all those things plus more.

That's my thoughts anyway.