Semicolons. Underscores. Spaces. Tabs. Every couple weeks it's some new minutiae profiled as the cause of all the world's problems. Don't people have better things to focus on than this?
Some people are detail-oriented. How can you expect Mr. Grimm to obsess over corner cases in his code but shrug at what he perceives are problems with representing it?
The people who think only in terms of the “big picture” while glossing over the details are not programmers. They are “architects.”
EDIT: This second statement is probably not correct. I would use strikethrough if I could. But the first statement still rings true with me, many programmers are detail-oriented, which means that they care about lots of things other people would consider irrelevant. Whether this is, on the whole, a good thing or not is another matter. But I do not think it is surprising.
I feel that you're mostly right. However I think we all focus on different details, to an extent.
For example, I'm a great typist so the underscore key has never really bothered me.
But to call the author out on being detail oriented would be inane of me. I myself don't like keyboards that have small backspace keys. I also still hate OS X for having the window control cluster on the top-left corner.
I know I certainly get paid to think about the details. The only variable here is which details.
