No, I think criticism is a good thing. Rants are good. They highlight issues with our current tools and over time that's what leads to progress. Using a plow isn't just different from digging in the dirt with a stick. It's better.
For instance, nulls are clearly a problem. After countless rants we're seeing languages that have better ways to deal with missing or optional values enter the mainstream (Swift, Scala, Rust).
J2EE's original idea to configure a system through separate XML files was heavily criticised for being too bureaucratic. After countless rants we got configuration by convention, better defaults and annotations as part of the source language.
Of course progress is not a straight line and quite often it's not clear what is and isn't progress because there are many trade-offs. But where would we be without a constant process of criticising our tools?
For instance, nulls are clearly a problem. After countless rants we're seeing languages that have better ways to deal with missing or optional values enter the mainstream (Swift, Scala, Rust).
J2EE's original idea to configure a system through separate XML files was heavily criticised for being too bureaucratic. After countless rants we got configuration by convention, better defaults and annotations as part of the source language.
Of course progress is not a straight line and quite often it's not clear what is and isn't progress because there are many trade-offs. But where would we be without a constant process of criticising our tools?