it sucks ass to care about tech because your options are basically:

- vertically integrated monopoly who can actually execute on things. their stated policy is "porn = bad, gay = porn"

- software company with some blessed devices who are so focused on locking five companies and ten governments into using their products for all eternity that, if you use their stuff, you are an involuntary beta tester. all the gamers use this for awful historical reasons and they keep gobbling everything up

- services company with some blessed devices who doesn't update their shit and whose device's security is so bad it's basically not an option for journalists or dissidents. everything they make is half baked and lasts at most five years, usually much less

- bespoke devices that get no software updates but are still beholden to the above. no support, no parts, might do most of what you want but only right when you buy it

- tiny hobby project that doesn't make software for the devices they sell. also those devices are sometimes fatally flawed

the last few times youtube has recommended me programming content for C and C++ fans, it has heavily been "people who are performatively upset about [what they are presenting as] the incompetence of JavaScript programmers"

it has often felt to me like the community that is created looks like a meritocracy from the outside -- because of the widely-acknowledged difficulty of C++ -- but it's actually pretty easy to cow newbies and be regarded as an expert by selling the memes.

some of the memes involve conspicuously consuming the right content (for instance, you should be reading the blogs of casey muratori/jonathan blow -- and you should probably think Jai is great, even if you haven't been put on the list of people allowed to use them)

some of the memes involve reciting the names of design patterns (arena allocation, SoA) or being incredibly negative to projects relying on different patterns (GC, OOP) w/o making a model that could relate those problems to issues with the final projects

this is occasionally ridiculous: you see people expressing concern over GC pauses in categories of software where a GC pause is definitionally not observable, like mobile apps.

(on mobile internet you would be lucky to get two nines from an echo server. in India, one nine)

you have this third thing which is really embarrassing, which is people saying "never make a change without profiling it," but those same people insisting that those other people's code is slow for stock-criticism-of-the-day-adjacent reasons (GC, OOP) without actually profiling it

anyway, content creators are starting out by taking people in this super permeable identity category of "programmer," where i'm calling it permeable because practically anyone can be a programmer.

viewers of this content are initially participating in this category, because they see themselves as programmers and would like to continue programming

creators encourage them to evaluate the members of this category by a particular kind of performance that is accidentally very gendered. for instance, it relies on Gordon Ramsay-style tough talk. and it's basically very anti-intellectual, because with "arrays are all you need" (which is often correct) you have this implication that everything everyone else has been doing is a bunch of academic faffing around

and you draw a distinction between programmers and real programmers where the latter group, because it requires this performance, is far less permeable. and it's at war with the former group.

but the category is slightly more permeable than it looks:

- you can, with time, learn to appropriate the performance
- you can eventually be validated by experts if you first treat them as experts. effectively, if you tell casey "i think you're very smart," Casey might come back and say "as far as I know, you're smart too."
- if you happen to be the worst thing in the world (a JavaScript programmer) you can receive an atom of sanction by saying "well, JavaScript performers other than me are idiots"

of course, there's another "worst thing in the world" that you could be, and that's an opinionated female programmer. your opinions are going to be held in even higher regard if you agree with the C++ influencer in the room, because you're probably the only woman in the room and he's desperate to be told he isn't sexist.

i have to admit that while C++-advocacy _shouldn't_ be connected to hate, and i think most C++ programmers are totally fine human beings, the content ecosystem around C++ seems awkwardly close to recreating the conditions of gamergate

but if i'm right about that it's not really surprising to me that you often see loud "I'm a (C|C++|Zig) programmer on Twitter, I have one weird trick, I'm going to insist your project is inferior unless you use it" types who have cross-pollinated with other groups that observe an X vs real X distinction drawn mostly on gender norms ("men vs real men"; "trans women vs real women")

and again most C++ programmers I've met are lovely, and I really think this is mostly a symptom of YouTube content

because you absolutely can't _actually_ write C++ in production without massive hubris or massive humility.

(and if it's the former, then either you're a student or something or I have probably already heard of you for the wrong reasons)