It was certainly influential. It's just bad on its own merits.

I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay.

If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.

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lurk2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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tptacek 3 hours ago | parent [-]

(1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents). It isn't a general prohibition on critique, which would be silly.

(2) You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.

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lurk2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> (1) That rule refers to things people have posted to HN in things like "Show HNs" (or their moral equivalents).

There’s nothing I’m seeing in the text as it is written that suggests this to be the case. There are just a lot of comments I see that amount to: “I don’t like this,” which can be an interesting signal by itself but not if users refuse to elaborate on it, which is what I (erroneously) thought was happening here.

> You may have missed the link to ~1,000 words of detailed criticism of CATB, on which I support my claim here that CATB is bad.

I did miss it, sorry. I clicked through and didn’t notice that the top comment was yours. I assumed you were just linking to a past discussion.

I’m sure you already know this, but on the off chance you don’t, you can click on a comment’s timestamp to get a permalink to the specific comment, like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35940773

	▲	tptacek 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		HN is a common law system; the real guidelines are the guidelines page itself, and the "jurisprudence" of years and years of Dan (and Tom) writing moderator comments. But you also know you're a little off the rails when you've derived a rule that would prohibit, say, criticism of a book --- "Teach Yourself C In 24 Hours is a bad book". Of course that's OK! But yeah, the big thing here is that the substance of my critique is on a different thread. It's disfavored to retype things you can just link to. I'd be irritated with me too if I just said "CATB is bad!" and left it at that.