How much insight goes unwritten?

Marco Arment has written a good post about the news that Joel Spolksy is going to end his Joel on Software blog next month. Marco ruminates on the potential reasons for Joel’s decision, noting that programmers can be an extremely unforgiving and hostile audience. Furthermore, the higher your profile, the louder and more numerous the critiques of your every utterance.

Some people claim that they don’t care and that they can ignore it. I don’t know if Joel can.

I can’t, which is one of the reasons why I rarely write about programming: it’s just not worth the risk of putting myself out there on that subject because the risk of strongly negative feedback is higher than with most other content that I can produce. It’s much easier to share my breakfast than my easily argued, easily disproven, intellectually vulnerable thoughts on programming.

It’s that last part that got me thinking. I’m certainly not a high profile professional blogger, but I too have received my share of backlash from programmers over my publicly stated technical opinions. I can recall two topics that have gotten me into debates on Twitter I would have rather avoided: checked exceptions in Java, and the ColdFusion web application language. The tone of both discussions was not constructive, and the end result is that I am more reluctant to publicly write about technical topics.