I agree completely that nerds do this. I did this. But I never did it to be "elite", or to keep the other person "below" me. Instead, I always assumed that the cheerleader (or whomever it was) was playing a very nasty practical joke on me—that if I accepted, they'd laugh in my face and wander away, or worse, I'd show up at the party to find myself a scapegoat for some random act of civil unrest previously committed that night by the partygoers. And yes, I even made friends only with other nerds—but only because I could tell, by the fear they showed toward the other groups, that they were a prey, not a predator, species, and were thus unlikely to harm me if I associated with them.

(If you can't tell, I was bullied for my entire elementary school life before entering high-school; I imagine I would have had quite a different outlook otherwise. Thankfully, by grade 11 or so, the concept of "clique" had dissolved in my high-school, so I did get to discover what a mentally-healthy high-school experience was like.)

For that reason, it's hard to listen to what else he has to say, no matter how relevant or (potentially) awesome.

Obvious that he's never been the low end of the totem pole. It may be different now, but when I was in high school, geeks and nerds got shit on by every group -- the jocks, the actors and actresses. Everyone.

The Nerds and programmers almost always find themselves on the bottom. Things look different when you're a Dalit.

Somehow it seems that all these stories tie into that theme: the expectations, the sense that one must live their High School role thenceforth, the contemporary judgments made based on factors from High School and so on.

[1] Adolescence is obviously formative just like anything else; I trust you can make the distinction.

The posters here generally are taking some kind of offense to this, and feel the need to shoot it full of holes. In the meantime, this behavior is only reinforcing the point to anyone who happens to not be a programmer.

It's actually quite striking.

Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook. His coding abilities cannot be judged unless it is known how much of the Facebook code he actually wrote. I assume the majority of it was not written by him.

Off topic, but please fix.

This is a wrong assumption, because there are people who are smart but are not (computer) nerds.

In what planet did you grow up?

No no no. That's me, but it's not because of anything to do with spotting "a sign of weakness".

Let me try to use a non-car analogy: Imagine I'm a carpenter (I'm not) and you come up to me and ask "how do I build a staircase?". The kinds of thoughts going through my head might be:

1) A staircase is obviously wood, cut to shape, then fixed together. It's also obviously quite a big thing. There's no need to answer with the low level "obvious" things like "you will need a large workshop", if you want to build a staircase you probably already have woodworking tools and experience and now want a bigger project, so an answer telling you basic outline steps would be insultingly patronising and unhelpful.

Also, an answer covering enough steps from scratch would take far too long for a forum post or discussion reply, so if I make the judgement that you don't have any of the experience and haven't considered it at all then you might get a dismissive "with a lot of work" reply.

(OK, maybe if we met informally and you asked, you might be just making conversation, but nobody goes to a technical forum and asks how to build a website just to make friends, do they, so that doesn't apply).

2) On the other hand, if you have spotted the obvious then you're asking one question but meaning another - maybe what kind of wood can I use to make it look nice, what building regs must it comply to, how can I reinforce it, what fireproofing treatments work well? What styles of bannister were popular in Victorian times?

There could be a lot of fun stuff, but again too many directions to go in all in one answer - this is where you get the "it depends what style you want" answer. It's not bullshit, it's better than that, it's skipping straight to acknowledgement, acceptance and directed at whichever obstacle or major design consideration comes to mind first.

So, "how do you build a website that people can join" leads me to think something like:

A website people can join means giving them a form to fill in, keeping their details, and providing a login prompt later. This is obvious to anyone who has used a couple of websites with signup forms.

So either you understand the steps of a site you can signup to and would have Googled until you found out more about those steps and asked a more specific question (What's HTML? What's a webhost? What happens to information in a form once I click submit? How can I keep it around?), or you're really asking for design and obstacle avoidance suggestions, e.g. scaling, security, server load, etc.

Hence the replies: You haven't Googled for the basics, that suggests you aren't ready for the amount of work involved, or you aren't really asking such a basic question so you don't get a basic answer.