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It also takes quite a lot of self-control on the part of the receiver to get something constructive out of derision. Frankly, it's exhausting.

A specific example: I was looking for some help with a bash script a while ago. I am no bash expert. I got heaps of abuse for my terrible script. At first I got emotional, and a good 75% of the time I would have stopped there, feeling grumpy and hating assholes on the internet. This time I took a deep breath, posted my whole script as a gist, and said to one of the most abusive but seemingly knowledgable IRC citizens, "Ok, I see it's not as robust as it could be, so I would appreciate some help. What am I doing wrong? How can I improve this?" The script was much improved in robustness and readability.

I got a good script but I was drained by the effort. If I had gotten your second response instead of the first, think of how much time and good will would have been saved.

Being respectful and understanding is not a waste of time, and being rude is not cutting through the bullshit. Your point regarding derision is spot on, except I don't think it makes the derider feel better either.

Or, to quote Heinlein:

'Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naïve, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.'

Formalities indicate social distance, they're general-fit heuristics. Of course they seem dishonest to kids, when you're friendly with your friends and don't need them, and when the other option is that you hold someone in poor regard, they can never be anything but lies.

I suspect anyone who's ever written an inter-company email will know the value of having a formal way of speaking that is unlikely to give offence though.

Completely agree.

You don't have to be a fluffy bunny about everything.

You stop and realize that your momentary investment in sincerity and tact reap rewards for your personal image, which people want to work with you, who is going to feel like taking a bit of extra time to help you out when you need it, and the general good will and atmosphere of the community, which inspires growth and adaption while lubricating the flow of ideas (as another response said; I'm stealing that).

I understand that this might be specific to me, but I'd actually rather have someone tell me:

"You're useless. For god's sake stop contributing until you get your sht together"

rather than:

“your skills don't seem to be quite at the level where we can accept your contributions; in particular, you don't understand X, Y, and Z very well and it shows in your code. I'm short on time, but if someone else has time to explain why that would be great.”

I don't have a good explanation why that is. Maybe it's because I feel some condescension in the second while the first one is just plain raw "I don't have time to deal with your sht. You're an adult: fix it and come back later".

The more polite response gives at least some shred of a foothold on which the recipient can find out how to better themselves. "Fix your shit" does't explain how your shit is lacking, or the major things you don't understand.

e.g., if I were to post some patch that used bubble sort, one could easily say "This is total crap. Don't come back until you fix your shit". If I were a noob, that wouldn't help me contribute better. If one were to rather say something like, "This is very inefficient," and then mention something about O notation or efficient sorting, and point out that this is a performance-critical section of the code, I might be more likely to actually take the time to learn enough to be able to fix it.

Consider also the effect on newer programmers. They start, they commit crap, you tell them to die in a fire. They get better, and years later decide that they're not going to bother fixing bugs in your project because "that guy's a jerk". Constructive criticism, or at the very least politeness, helps prevent poisoning the well of talent that is interested in working with you.

Programming, more so than many other fields, has a strong tradition of self-improvement and education. Tell any "noob" that they are an idiot for using bubble sort and they should have more than enough resources and know-how to figure out why they are wrong and correct it themselves. (Either they independently invented it themselves, in which case they are at least moderately clever and you just told them the name of what they created (what they should google), or they googled it in the first place so they should be able to google it again).

Is it best, in a controlled environment with both low signal and noise, to take your time and explain things in detail in a "civil" manner? Sure. That works great in (small) classrooms for example. In a public kernel dev mailing lists though? No, a fuck off should suffice. If the recipient of the fuck off wants more, they can seek it in a more appropriate place.

IRC is somewhere in the middle; usually civility or ignoring the person works best. This is particularly true since most IRC channels are fairly explicitly there for people who want to give or receive advice. I've only told someone who was seeking help from me on IRC to fuck off once, and that is when he demanded I talk with him on skype instead of IRC, and pressed the issue.

Edit: I suppose I shouldn't expect a civil response if I explain in a civil manner why I don't think civility is always necessary. Hoisted by my own petard perhaps?

If that's true I think it is pretty specific to you, and honestly I doubt that you would actually prefer it in practice. It's easy to say you can take the abuse when it's clearly framed as an alternative to a polite comment, not so easy when you get piled on by a bunch of obnoxious commenters. Emotional maturity makes it easier to deal with, but it still sucks.

Also you can still give a franker response without being blatantly derisive: "Thanks for your contributions, but I'm afraid they do not meet the quality standards of our project. I think you might need to learn a little more about X, Y and Z, before you do any more work."

Hmm, the first one would basically stop me contributing at all. You go in feeling all good and like you're going to lend a hand, presumably to people you respect if you want to work with them in the first place, and then they turn around and basically tell you they think you're a retard. It'd hurt pretty bad.

I'd be interested, would you find something like this to be as patronising:

"Thanks for your submission. Could you improve X, Y, Z and resubmit?"

Definitely less patronizing, yes. I like it very much, but that works better in a situation where you can see that they already understand X/Y/Z reasonably well. I guess I was trying to present the worst possible situation, where it seems like they are stumbling around with concepts that seem to be over their heads, and then I think the risk of being patronizing is worth the value of being as honest as possible.

A good response here would probably look more like, "While we appreciate you making the effort to contribute to the project, the patches you've been submitting don't meet our quality standards because [reason - poorly structured? no tests? full of bugs?]. I recommend you [take an online learning course, write tests, read our coding guidelines] before you submit any more patches."

Maybe, if they're right. If they're wrong, the second one is a lot better than the first.

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That's not a particularly good analogy, because both roles require significant commitment to practice and study. Trying to achieve both would take would likely render you worse than most at either. Being a good programmer takes training and effort; being respectful and understanding does not take any superhuman effort. It just requires understanding that demeaning people is not acceptable behavior.

vs.

SHUT UP. Your analogy is awful and I never want to hear that kind of drivel from another HN poster EVER again. Go rtfm on English lol