Hammett (author of Monorail) writes:

"Funny enough, [Jeffrey] Palermo never seem to care about Castle. Suddenly he - and others - became the world’s expert in MVC, testability, maintainability and good architecture. I wonder, what have been using to develop web apps before the ASP.Net MVC? WebForms? If so, I’m not that keen to believe that they are what they claim."

I do not profess to be the world's expert in MVC.  In fact, the astute among you have noticed that I don't actually claim to be the world's expert at *anything* here at Gray's Matter except looking good and getting laid all the time.  Thank goodness for this!  According to Hammett, since the IBM PC Jr BASIC apps I wrote when I was 6 were not the height of testable and maintainable architecture people I am forever disqualified from hyping up these same factors to other people as paramounts of good software.  If only I had not been so naive in my elementary school years, perhaps I, too, could have evangelized good practices in software development!

I don't actually recall Jeff claiming to be the leading authority on MVC or anything else for that matter - so I'm not sure where the context of the discussion is coming from - but is it not possible for someone to *begin* caring about testability, maintainability and the like?  I can't speak for Jeffrey, but I was not always an evangelist for TDD,  I certainly wasn't always writing code that didn't drive lesser minds insane, and I certainly didn't write sentences chock full of double negatives (not every new habit is a good one). 

This exclusionary, "nerds in the treehouse" style elitism is off-putting to people getting into our industry.  I fail to see entirely how boosting and evangelizing good qualities of software development, regardless of where you came from to get there, is a bad thing. 

If you spend 25,000 years emphasizing good practice and someone else joins up and emphasizes it more (and maybe even has a louder voice than you do), do you think the best reaction is to:

a) vitriolically shout them down from your corner of the web
b) act as a light, encouragement, and advisor for that person, so that when their voice is heard by a large number of people, it is an informed and accurate voice?

I tend to think far more highly of the latter, because *that* is actually helping our industry get better.  Not the former.