And yet I can't help drawing a parallel: comp.lang.lisp was famously full of the hateful spewing of an intolerant contributor, and for that both the group and the contributor (Erik Naggum) were basically worshipped by a non-trivial community. Why did Lisp produce that outcome, while JavaScript produces this?
It's basically the same. comp.lang.lisp and Erik Naggum may've been worshipped by a non-trivial community, but it was still a small community. The rest of us still hated it.
I'm sure there're people out there that enjoy comp.lang.javascript too.
And as a simple perusal of threads that David has posted in shows, he has he fair share of 'you're absolutely right David, jQuery, mootools and all the rest suck' style worshipping.
For some reason (which I could make guesses at) Usenet attracts this type of kookery, and when kooks gather, they tend to create this appearance that people actually value their rants and conspiracies.
As a result, you get the perceived 'Erik is god' views of comp.lang.lisp, whereas people that try to read, or contribute, consider(ed) him and his ilk as a deterrent to useful discussion.
Basically every community has their heroes, people that from the outside look like cult leaders but from the inside look like wise sages. Hacker News and Paul Graham. Joel on Software and Joel Spolsky. StackOverflow and Jeff Atwood/Joel Spolsky. FictionAlley and Cassandra Claire. Haskell and Oleg Kiselyov. Google and Jeff Dean.
Their popularity outside the community seems to reflect the popularity of the community itself, which in turn reflects how much it does for the world at large and how similar its values are to the "mainstream". I'm kinda curious why such cult followings develop, but it seems to be a near-universal feature of communities of sufficient size (basically anything over Dunbar's number, where not all members know all other members). I've got a few hypotheses on this but no answers.
According to his LinkedIn, David Mark is now working at Sitepen, the primary contributors to Dojo. I guess he no longer believes that all JavaScript frameworks are completely idiotic...
Every Usenet programming language (and some that aren't PL related) community has a troll/kook like David. Over time you learn to read around them, or read them only for humour value.
