Ok, it's a wee bit off-topic. But it's a letter about passion for one's work and attention to detail. This is the kind of thing that makes Apple's products so gorgeous--there are programmers and graphic designers and hardware engineers screaming profanity when one damn pixel of their work is altered by someone who has no idea how important a single letter "a" might be.
Yet, if you follow the responses both positive and negative, also not so great.
Let's imagine I'm to python hacking as Giles is to restaurant criticism. I punch out such a cracking piece of code that Guido himself wept on his first reading. A hapless QA engineer rewrites my punchline, a lambda compressing not less than six lines into one, back into a six line function. (As to whether Guido would in fact weep at such code is topic for another discussion).
I fire off an invective harangue to the QA manager. He posts it on the intranet.
The other grey beards nod in agreement: "Fucking QA engineers", they mutter, "'bout time someone showed 'em!"
Meanwhile the rest of the company thinks I'm a pompous, sanctimonious twat. With a single missive I've repositioned myself from wronged to wrongdoer. And perhaps simultaneously emboldened the stupid wretch.
Never underestimate the didactic value of a discreet word. (This is, mind you, a one time offer: Next time said QA engineer gets it in the neck.)
Let me add that I love Giles and have immeasurable respect for him as a writer and critic. He is easily the best fuckin' part of the fuckin' F-Word: He just over-cooked this one.
I hope you appreciate the difference between the abrasive, obsessive perfectionist with a drive to create something great and the competent employee who gets along well with everyone and always put the needs of the many above the desires of the one.
Both are needed for great companies. Only one is needed for great software. See also: Linus Torvalds' emails ;-)
p.s. As I read the OP, this was about a situation where editing the original actually changed the desired behaviour. So the example I would have chosen would be that a code reviewer, instead of firing back a question about the one-liner, changes it without any discussion. And breaks the application. Whereas you seem to be discussing a hypothetical case where changing something from one to six lines has no effect on the resulting functionality.
And whilst I agree a merely competent employee is unlikely to create great software, I hope you're not saying only abrasive, obsessive perfectionists can create great software.
As for the example,
def f(x,y):
return x > y
no more captures the intended behaviour of
lambda x,y: x > y
than "go for nosh" does "go for a nosh." Nuance.
But all this dances around the actual point - that Giles managed to transform himself from wronged to wrongdoer with a single expletive laden harangue, and that this is good for no one, least of all Giles.
It may be possible to create great software without being abrasive. It is certainly the case that you can be abrasive without creating great software. I'm not so sure that you can dispense with an obsession for your vision of "perfection."
Now right away we see the OP's point. If I rewrote your sentence, the implications of using the words "firm" and "prick" in close proximity would be lost ;-)
Well, from looking at the article it looks like the discreet word has been had already ("we discussed your turning three of my long sentences into six short ones in a single piece"), and this is in fact the getting-it-in-the-neck part (he does acknowledge that there is a chance that it was not the same guy as before editing with his review, but the implication is that this chance is very slight)
You can tell this a really educated guy. He's a restaurant reviewer but he draws vocabulary from chemistry, talking about the "dual valency" of a noun.
