@22
I mean, sort of?  it's really hard to talk about.  The mental mode involved here isn't exactly easy to describe.  Talk to a bunch of different programmers who work on the sort of stuff I do and you'll get a bunch of different descriptions, all kind of poetic and all not making sense at all to the next person.  But everyone I've worked with who's like that is perfectly personable on meetings and in person and whatever else.  The people on the programmer sites who get the flack for this are often perfectly well adjusted in any other context, and in fact explaining in person tones it way down just because tone of voice counts for a lot here when it comes to conveying information and getting across that it's just conveying information.  I can't think of another profession that's like programming offhand, though.  Maybe some other forms of engineering, but in general when it comes to learning to think about a bunch of things all at once without any way to put some of them down and having to communicate those to other people, programming wins, and there's just no shared vocabulary to describe what coding is actually like once you're far enough along that this begins to apply (and to everyone who has gotten the "organize your code better" talk, consider that this is *after* organizing your code well, not before).

But also, try explicitly adding subtext to your communication sometime.  It's not about forgetting how to treat people.  Putting it back is worse.  Going "and now I've explained the extremely complicated thing in a concise manner, let's add back some subtext so I seem nice" doesn't come out nice, it comes out as not genuine and also sarcastic and worse than if you'd just let it alone.  now add in something like hackernews or twitter where you've got a character limit and people who are used to concise communication and who put the maximum amount of information in everything they say don't even have room for the subtext if they did work it in, not that I think removing character limits would really solve anything.

Where this becomes a problem in my opinion is when people forget that people are people, which you see a lot in Google business decisions and everything Facebook does.  There's a second mode where you *do* forget that the world isn't code.  That's bad, but super rare.  Unfortunately the rest of us get painted with that brush as well because those sorts of people make billions, since that's a very effective money-making strategy.  Put people that the average person isn't going to get next to evil billionaires who act like that, cherry-pick a few posts that look kind of bad, and instant stereotype.  But I do wish it would die because it's really not true.