He writes of these lone-wolf Lisp hackers and their inability to finish things off properly.
The phrase ‘throw-away design’ is absolutely made for the BBM and it comes from the Lisp community. Lisp allows you to just chuck things off so easily, and it is easy to take this for granted.
I saw this 10 years ago when looking for a GUI to my Lisp. No problem, there were 9 different offerings. The trouble was that none of the 9 were properly documented and none were bug free.
Basically each person had implemented his own solution and it worked for him so that was fine. This is a BBM attitude; it works for me and I understand it. It is also the product of not needing or wanting anybody else's help to do something.