What was your first exposure to flame wars, and what impact did it have on you?
Mine was on usenet, in the comp.lang.c newsgroup, which was dedicated to discussing one of the foremost computer programming languages at the time. I had just discovered the internet that week, and lost many hours reading other peoples’ opinions on stuff that didn’t matter much to me.
Before long, on comp.lang.c, someone by the name of Lennart Benshcop (who may or may not be the one who turns up in Google) posted a question asking for help on his C programming homework. He couldn’t get it to compile, and he suspected that he wasn’t properly using the source code his teacher provided.
This part is technical, but here goes: his teacher required that everyone use his header file, which (through the use of #define statements) changed enough of the C language to make it look like COBOL, a rather obsolete and obtuse programming language.
It’s an understatement to say that most computer programmers who are familiar with COBOL have a rather low opinion of it. COBOL was designed by a room full of U.S. Navy bureaucrats with the intention of making it human-readable. Readable, it was to a fault - instead of saying “x = 1 + 2”, one would be required to write it as “ADD 1 TO 2 GIVING X”. Forget accomplishing anything involving algebra in fewer than a dozen lines.
I was impressed with the responses to Lennart’s request. Within an hour, more than a hundred people weighed in, lambasting Lennart and his teacher, and then tearing into each other. If I remember correctly, much of the later messages was a furious discussion on whether Lennart was trolling, and whether name-calling was an appropriate response, and so on. It took me the better part of my lab time to finish reading the thread, but it was like watching a train wreck.
Afterward, just thinking about it gave me the giggles followed by the willies.
So that’s my first exposure to a flame war. What’s yours?