How to Look Like an Idiot

So, you want to look like an idiot in front of other people? You've come to the right place.

Let's start with an example. You can be like this guy and get on an erlang mailing list and rant about how much you hate python and how you'll never use it because of how much you hate it. It's the most ugly language ever because it has significant whitespace. (be sure to call Guido an idiot and repeatedly talk about how idiotic that is).

Most python programmers I've spoken to admit they thought the significant whitespace was a dumb idea before actually sitting down and writing code in it. In the end, the code only works correctly when it's indented the way a good programmer would indent his code anyway.

I have seen the other side of this. Several times I have had people bring me perl code they'd written with no indentation and asked me to explain why it wasn't working. Every time, I told the programmer I couldn't read it and to go back and indent it properly before showing it to me. After a little argument, he'd storm off and indent it and generally come back to tell me he saw an obvious problem and it works now.

It's OK to sometimes want to avoid something you know little about for silly reasons, but seriously, you're not going to win respect by going to a completely unrelated forum and ranting about how much you hate something you don't understand at all.