"The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable."

Definitely not. Based on my observations from a career as an open source and agency developer it was obvious at a glance which of these camps any given developer lived in by their code quality. With few exceptions make-it-go types tended to produce brittle, hacky, short-sighted work that had a tendency to produce as many or more problems than it solved, and on more than one occasion I've seen developers of this stripe lose commit access to FOSS projects as a result of the low quality of their contributions.

"nobody got into it because programming in Perl was somehow aesthetically delightful."

Compared to trying to get stuff accomplished in C Perl was an absolute dream to work with and many devs I knew gravitated to web development specifically for their love of the added flexibility and expressiveness that Perl gave them compared to other commonly used languages at the time. Fortunately for us all language design and tooling progressed.

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thedevilslawyer 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Generalize much? How would you feel if code-as-craft people were called out to be anti-social nerds who spent times on umpteenth rewrite and refactor, didn't care what impact that had on the actual user they were building for?

	▲	forgetfreeman an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I'd thank you for the laugh and assume you worked in project management, marketing, or some other low info industry segment. I've worked with hundreds of developers over my career and the only time I've brushed up against anyone who even approximates what you are describing would be in HN comment threads. The craft-oriented women and men I've had the pleasure of working with have without exception held user experience and the future sanity of other developers interacting with the code they wrote as core requirements, every project, every line of code. Getting it right the first time tends to cut down significantly on refactoring.