Yeah, honestly -- who would vote this article up?

I wonder if we need something akin to meta-moderation, to account for people who vote up low-quality articles.

Perhaps I am being overly cynical, but I suspect that bad articles get voted up by people who have posted snarky comments, in hopes that more people will read the article and agree with them on how bad it is.

Of course, this wouldn't explain the current score (more upvotes than posters), so perhaps some of the votes are from trolls, accidental clicks, people who only read titles, people who think the article is ironically amusing, or people who want to draw attention to bad content in hopes that mechanisms are put in place for its banning/removal.

I liked it and voted it up. But I knew it would get lots of bad comments because of the spelling mistakes. That's just arrogance to me - you can't expect everybody to be a native speaker of English.

I thought the article was pretty terrible, but not because of the spelling mistakes.

As an aside, just because you're not a native speaker of English is not an excuse for poor spelling: a foreigner can use a spellchecker just as well as a native speaker.

Hm, but they don't get it right all the time, and the article was old. Maybe back then the options weren't as good.

network of trust?

I posted it mostly for nostalgia reasons. I read this years and years ago when I first started programming in QBasic. The article itself hasn't aged well (it's all over the place).

I'm not sure why, but recently I was thinking about it because I've been unable to get anything done on my side projects.

I still wanted to ask the question: Do you suffer from programmer's apathy?

I, for one, enjoyed the article, even if it's not the type of stuff I'd want to see on the front page all the time. Even if none of the tips apply to the 1337 folks here, I think the problem of apathy developing toward projects you supposedly started for fun is worth thinking about. I've certainly experienced it. A couple random thoughts:

Pseudocode is the ultimate high-level language. I can think of a few recent problems it might have have helped me think through.

The article advocates focusing on one slice of the program at a time to avoid apathy. While nowadays vertical slices are trendy, this advocates horizontal slices, A.K.A., the Waterfall Model. Is this the answer to apathy?