WhatHaveTheRomansEverDoneForUs™

Classic two-pronged pointless abuse from Loontards.

I believe the original version is summed up by a blog troll attacking, not the actual OP, but the person writing it. The “argument” goes along the following lines:

(1) I have no evidence that you are a programmer.
(2) Therefore you are not a programmer.
(3) And you’ve never contributed to FOSS, have you?
(4) If you were a programmer, and you’d contributed to FOSS, you would preface every comment with a link to your contribution.
(5) Public order. Whoops, sorry, that’s a quote from the original.

Points 1 and 3 (and possibly 5) invariably apply just as much to the troll. Points 2 and 4 are ridiculous false inferences.

To cap it all, the entire set of propositions is a non-sequitur. It is clearly not necessary to be a programmer before you can complain about the inadequacy of any given program for its task.

A more recent (I think) version of this inanity goes as follows (there are many variants, but they’re all along the same logical lines):

(1) Sure, Windows (OSX, whatever) has maintained backward compatibility for N years.
(2) Which means that they’re not really innovative, are they?

A slightly more refined version of this, complete with total ignorance of relative costs, fundamental design decisions, truth, accuracy, and indeed the cumbersome layering within Linux, is:

(1) Microsoft had a chance to replace the creaky old Win32 API with the NT API [otherwise known as the kernel API supporting OS “personalities”].
(2) The Win32 API is still there. This forces you to call the kernel through A->B->C->D …. [several of these will have been pulled from the troll’s ass^W^W Wikipedia].
(3) Therefore it’s not a modern OS

An utterly absurd variant on the above is

(1) You don’t get a choice of desktops on MS or Apple, do you?

Many other diseased versions exist in the wild.