Computers themselves are very pedantic, so we wouldn't be very good at using them if we weren't good at being technically correct. The compiler won't forgive you for missing a semicolon or mismatched parentheses.
So I strongly suspect that our programming ability is related to our capacity for being pedantic, as annoying as that may be socially.
I doubt one would get very far in any kind of serious debugging session without the ability to be pedantic. It doesn't mean we can't judge the time and place for it.
I never said that one caused the other, only that pedantry is necessary when writing correct computer programs.
Huge bugs can come from small mistakes. The bug that tripped up Colin and ended up as a story on HN a while back was nothing more than a missing ++ in his code. Yet that tiny mistake screwed up the security of his cryptography.
I take it you think I was "foaming at the mouth to practise pedantry". Well, I certainly wasn't foaming, and it doesn't seem to me especially pedantic to want to distinguish between "hiding X in plain sight" and "doing something else that enables X to remain hidden", however clever that something-else may be -- because real Purloined-Letter-style "hiding in plain sight" is a different sort of trick, exploiting different human failings.
Suppose, for instance, that instead of dissolving the Nobels de Hevesy had incorporated them into something that looked like a satirical picture mocking von Laue and Franck, and hung it on the wall. And suppose that had worked, in that the Nazi authorities never noticed that the picture had real Nobel prizes in it. That, to my mind, would have been clever-and-touching-and-funny in a different way to what de Hevesy actually did. Do you really think it's mouth-foamingly pedantic to want to have different terminology available for describing those different things?
I'm sorry for the harshness of the earlier reply, but yes, I imagine that it was a kind of eager, if sincere, pedantry. I get where you are coming from, and again, the harshness was more aimed at the community's collective tendency.
