Banning “feigned surprise”

I just loved this essay about banning “feigned surprise”, a pretty common response in the programming universe.

“Feigned surprise” (when someone gasps and says something like: “you don’t even know about monads?”) is a method of belittling someone and lording your superiority over them.

As a writer, I try to assume that anything that might be puzzling to me might be puzzling to the reader. A piece of information that I find interesting and, at least at some point in the recent past, was new to me, might be new and interesting to the reader. That new information is a gift to me, one that I absolutely love to share with the reader. Feigned surprise is the enemy of that gift.

Here’s a link to hacker school, mentioned in the linked essay, in case you are interested.