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If there's a valuable insight here, I couldn't get to it. The childish name-calling put me off.

There might be an insight, but it's not particularly valuable.

Zed Shaw in a nutshell.

We shouldn't promote his materials. His book on python (Learn Python The Hard Way) is widely regarded in python circles as being one of the worst tomes of knowledge. Mostly due to his "I'm the expert don't question me" attitude.

Just for that, I gave the post an upvote. It's like you've never heard of the streisand effect.

The Streisand effect talks about hiding, removing or censoring a piece of information. To me, that is quite different than not promoting.

It's a distinction without a difference. The end result is the same, along with the resulting Streisand effect.

The "Hard Way" books are not for everyone, but they are exactly what some people need. Not everyone learns the same way.

I like having Shaw around because his absolutism inspires other absolutists to step out of cover. It's good to know where all the absolutists are hiding...

Are those people going to be good and happy programmers?

Shaw is himself a good programmer, although I wouldn't hazard a guess about his happiness... I would expect long term programming prospects to be orthogonal to learning style. Certainly anyone claiming otherwise would have the burden of proof.

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