I strongly disagree. Being brief and to the point is difficult and requires hard work, and it is impolite to assume that what you have to say is so important that other people should be expected to read the whole thing before being able to decide if it is relevant to them.

The article in question would benefit greatly from a summary that allows the reader to decide if reading the whole thing is worth the effort. In scientific publishing an abstract is part of good form. In journalism the structures are usually less formal, but a good journalist will sell you a lengthly article without requiring you to read the whole thing.

I have been criticized for writing at length and being bad at summarizing myself. I know it is hard. And of course I find it annoying when people point out how bad I am at writing. But you know what: it is extremely constructive criticism.

I was brief and to the point, though. There's a lot of material to cover and I did so fairly quickly.

I figured the title was enough to give away the general gist of the article: it's about a programming language and the problems it had. If that's a subject that interests you, perhaps the article is worth a read. I wrote the article to talk about a subject I know well, for people interested in that subject.

tl;dr: not everything can be dumbed down to TV-style sound bytes.

If you were to submit a paper to a conference or a journal and they asked you to provide an abstract -- would you be offended? Why not? When you read ACM or IEEE journals, do you see the abstracts as "dumbing down to TV-style sound bytes"?

Let's put it this way: if you can't figure it out from the title of the article, it's just not for you.

The article was not meant for people with a casual interest in the subject, but those who wanted to know about the details.

If that's not you, so be it. I would note, however, that at this point you've surely spent more time complaining here than it would have taken you to read the entire article.

He is not writing for the ACMA or the IEEE. He is writing a blog. There is no need for an executive summary! His article is fine, it took me no longer than 3 minutes or so to read it. Great article!

Have you ever read a technical article by Donald Knuth? He is not brief; he writes engagingly about low-level details. David's posting was just fine, in fact great. The posting was not that long and you could pick up the gist of it in the first few paragraphs.