Software development topics I've changed my mind on

> Most won't care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are

> (…)

> People who stress over code style, linting rules, or other minutia remain insane weirdos to me. Focus on more important things.

What you call “stressing over minutiae” others might call “caring for the craft”. Revered artisans are precisely the ones who care for the details. “Stressing” is your value judgement, not necessarily the ground truth.

What you’re essentially saying is “cherish the people who care up to the level I personally and subjectively think is right, and dismiss everyone who cares more as insane weirdos who cannot prioritise”.

To reduce your argument to its essence, you're saying typesetting is part of the craft of writing. I've yet to meet an author who believes this (other than enjoying editing their own work as output from a typewriter), and I think the same broadly applies to code. It's not that everyone thinks these things are unimportant, it's that caring deeply about doing them a particular way is orthogonal to the craft. It's something that has long been lampooned (tabs vs. spaces, braces, etc.) as weird behavior.

More than one writer refuses to use a computer, preferring typewriters. Harlan Ellison learned how to repair typewriters after he could no longer find anyone to fix his. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen.

Authors totally obsess over details that seem irrelevant to people outside that craft.

There is a class of people who refuse to see computer programming as an art.

They try to shoehorn it into being an engineering discipline and comparing it to authoring a book (something you can't give timelines on or T-Shirt size) probably horrifies them.

Ah, the joys of overloading. Do you mean "art" as the high-brow stuff we see in galleries and are produced in volumes of dozens per artist-years? Or do you mean "art" as the more common stuff that's produced by artisans are the rate of dozens per week? Because to me it's more the latter -- I'm an artisan, not an artist.