It seems that, if anything, he's attacking the ivory tower mentality that a lot of geeks have. He's looking at the whole software picture, rather than just the utilitarian aspect.
Spolsky has a lot of good things to say, but he does take it a little too far sometimes. His technical credibility took a major hit in my eyes when I heard about the mess that is Wasabi. Still, the way he runs his company is very innovative, and he has a lot of good things to say about enhancing productivity. Overall, I wouldn't say he's a great technical resource, but in terms of running a successful niche business, he's got some good ideas.
I think Wasabi is very misunderstood. Creating a meta language that "compiles" down to PHP or ASP makes a lot of sense. Don't we need every advantage we can get? If doing that speeds up his development cycle and helps him support both Linux and Windows customers, I wouldn't call that a mess.
It's his secret weapon to build his product both in ASP and PHP. I bet if you were him you'd say "go away customer, I only write my software in Rails/LISP/Haskell".
Real programmers work on bug trackers. You can move the columns in tables around, for gods' sake! Why don't you people appreciate genius when you see it?
I bet it's because you don't understand pointer arithmetic. Morons...
And yet, I spent 5 years working for a company using Peregrine ServiceCenter, the most god-awful piece of junk software I've ever seen, for trouble-tickets. I actually once measured how much time was lost in a day because of its suck. It wasn't insignificant, and it didn't even begin to cover the emotional effects on productivity. I hated it with a passion, to the point where it would be personal revenge for me to drive Peregrine out of business (at least out of the trouble-ticket software business).
