cat -v's Harmful section is one of the biggest cesspools in the history of stinky software devs. Their harmful page consists of SCATHING critiques (read: no, they don't) of such "harmful"(???) things such as the LTV, ethanol (not a special acronym or name, just str8 ethanol), and the very concept of respect. None of these are free from criticism, that's not what I'm saying, but their critiques are either non-existant or just so blatantly misguided and stemmed from the wrong place that it's actually hard to take this site seriously!
My personal favorite examples are their hatred for Python, BASH, and glibc; none of which have a single article to their name describing how they suck or how they are harmful! I also LOVE their format of critiques which has some funny, AVGN-esque statements about how "I'd rather drag my dick through a sizzling desert and then present it to a herd of hungry tigers than use this garbage!" with actual, cohesive and genuine critiques all the way at the asscrack of the site. At the bottom of their list of "harmful software" it reads: "At the moment a detailed rationale is not provided for most of this, so figuring out why some things are considered more or less harmful than others is left as an exercise for the reader." This can also be read as: "I'm too much of a lazy prick to compile a bunch of articles from 80 year olds explaining their gripes with a certain piece of software and then take quotes from a usenet discussion and paste them onto a fucking HTML file."
Again, this should not be read as "if you have no fleshed-out criticism, that means the software is good/not harmful!". If you think this is what this half-assed blog is about then you don't know me at all. However, the ancient computer scientists who have quit production on the harmful site since 2020 also do not seem to have come up with any sort of idea of what a usecase is. Python is actually quite a great beginning language (albeit not one I would use seriously) for people first getting into programming. Many of the links that take you to critiques of Object-Oriented programming actually suggests that OO languages are at best useful in some cases and just completely unnecessary at worst! It's an individual programmers choice to include objects and object-oriented languages in their software (funny, considering the importance the site places on individualism), so why make a whole song and dance about it? Write your software, tell people why OOP is inefficient, but don't say "harmful" like the very concept of OOP is coming out of the computer to fuck your wife and shit on the carpet.
cat -v frequently heralds the C developers and proprietors K+R as well as Thompson as GODS OF COMPUTING!! Nothing could ever top our God, C! Please ignore the fact that our fetish for "simplicity" has led to morons using this PL and fucking up all the software. It's the software that does all the suck! Not the programmers or the people creating the software!
Funny enough, if you can make it past all the idolatry and find the pages for K, R, and T respectively, you'll find they would fucking HATE the "l33t tr011z!11!!" at cat -v. As anyone who has gotten this far into my rant knows, Thompson actually co-wrote Go (a language with support of most typical OO capabilities, by the way!) with one Rob Pike. As far as K+R go, they both intentionally avoid provocation for the sake of making asses of themselves! Kernighan wrote a scathing critique of Pascal in its infancy, which had very valid points as to why some programmers shouldn't use it, and he titled it with the perfect name. "Why Pascal Isn't My Favorite" has got to be the most accurate description of what's really going on! Ritchie had an interview with cat -v, where he calls out Pike's intentionally provocative talk on the uselessness on systems research! These 3 are the most methodical, level-headed individuals in the entire scene of computer science and research, why do these morons think they'd ever have the approval of these individuals?
In conclusion, cat -v and its several pages are the most braindead, unnecessary, and oftentimes fallacious to its core. They hate standards, but assume that their rules and laws of software are true because they said so; they hate OO languages like C++ and critique the very existence of Object Orientation yet uphold kt and rp's Go as the second coming of Christ; and they are overall morons of a category not typically seen by humans often, I call it the "smart moron." Thanks for reading, if you disagree add me on Discord (swagmasterdom) and yell at me about how stupid I am, and I'll probably write another article sometime in the next eon. -smd