"It was eye-opening to see how little attention was paid to serious [people] vs hucksters," you said in a comment last week. That's a good start, and the right frame of thought in which to try to infer an answer to the question you didn't quite ask.
I also realize the insult you didn't quite offer, but while there are grounds for anyone with a Ph.D. to offer me offense, breadth of knowledge is really none of them. You are an expert specialist and I respect that as it deserves, which is less than you imagine but more than you fear.
I simply gave some pointers on how to use less aggressive language. If you perceived a hidden insult, I'd encourage you to reflect whether that comes from the same place that the aggressive language does.
"Aggressive?" I would go as far as uncompromising, discourteous, perhaps even rude. But aggression? Really. Do me the courtesy of not resorting to the absurd, not at least if you mean me to go on taking you seriously.
Yes; from what I've seen, you can be hostile, presumptuous, belitting, and confrontational. What you just posted is a good example. There's just no need for the section starting "not at least...". It's an intimidating phrase.
"Intimidating." I remind you this is a website, where I have publicly disclosed my real identity for years while you remain anonymous.
That is your choice, of course. But this is what I mean about not taking you seriously. No remotely reasonable person could possibly believe anyone competent to participate in Hacker News and be able also to honestly claim to be intimidated by someone taking an impatient tone in mere discourse on the relative merits of programming languages, in a context where I am the one whose identity is known.
Such a transparent lie would ill befit a child of five, and whatever axe you have here to grind, the way you go about it is just embarrassing. Your critique, such as it was, has been submitted, received, and evaluated as ill founded. You have no further business with me.
All this stuff about "taking you seriously" is basic emotional manipulation. It adds nothing to the argument and serves no purpose than to try to make me feel inferior. Same thing when you compare me to a five year old. You dress it up with pompous phrases like "child of five" (or "remotely reasonable" or "mere discourse"), which I suspect is another way to project dominance. Perhaps you don't like facing up to the fact that your language is hostile and confrontational, but it is.
My language is exactly as I intend it to be, but yours is not; you meant to say I sought to intimidate, and ended up saying I intimidated. I remain convinced this is less typo and more admission against interest, but never mind; even at face value it's embarrassing, out of someone who has after all essayed to critique my usage.
We seem to be having an argument that you started, inasmuch as I was not actually in need of any explanation of the phenomenon I described; it does not bewilder at this late date when those with extensive social and professional investment in the waning Rails scene react badly to discussion of that wane. If the progress of that argument fails to satisfy, perhaps another interlocutor will give you a more enjoyable time.
Until then, you will either address any of the variety of substantive points raised earlier in discussion which you have carefully heretofore ignored, or you'll receive no further response from me. Not that I don't come here precisely for pointless disputation, but even my battered pride eventually scruples at this kind of pop-psychological pettifogging you so favor.
I wasn't trying to start an argument. You complained about negative reactions to your posts. I highlighted some aspects of your language and tone that provoke those negative reactions. You then became defensive and tried to belittle me. When I pointed out the irony of this, you tried to belittle me further.
So this all started when you replied to me opining thusly:
> I was asked for an opinion and I gave one. Don't make too much of it. Rails devotees can't stand hearing a bad word about their baby, they always make a fuss.
I quote my own initial comment here, unabridged and verbatim, for the sake of adjacency with the following question: Where in this do you find a complaint?
That's a substantive question, not merely a rhetorical one. I would characterize my tone in that quote accurately as dismissive and uncharitably as contemptuous. But for the way you've talked about it now at such length, I can conclude only that I gave a mistaken impression of uncomprehending dismay. I don't understand how that could be so, given I literally do proffer an explanation for the behavior I'm meant not to comprehend; that explanation might be inaccurate and attract criticism accordingly, but to behave as though required to piece things together de novo is unwarranted. It's inconsistent to argue both that I must not understand the effect I create and that I must set out to create it, don't you think? Yet that's pretty much where you seem to end up.
You having concluded otherwise, ie that there is some essential ignorance here on my part requiring your effort to redress, I therefore ask on what basis you so conclude - the better to avoid again wasting my time, and incidentally also someone else's, in such fashion as this. Good grief, if I could've corrected that misapprehension right up front, we could've dispensed with everything after, to no doubt mutual preference.
And if you'll forgive myself quoting myself from earlier in the conversation, one more time:
> Meanwhile detailed and substantive technical critiques provided by other users - critiques of the sort I learned a decade ago not to bother making - go totally ignored as I knew that they would.
The people you refer to as "devotees" who "can't stand hearing a bad word" strike me as ordinary users whose personal experience simply contradicts your claims. The absolutism of those claims played a part. If you see someone say "X is impossible", but you have personally seen X occur, it's natural to want to correct the record.
That isn't really an answer, or not one at least on point. You're saying my approach made people angry and they responded in a way influenced by that anger, again as though I were unaware. But I have been having this conversation for well over a decade now, nearly 15 years. You will forgive me if I do not always behave as though it were my first time, especially when disingenuousness on the part of my interlocutors has been such a constant over that span.
What would you like to suggest I would gain by acting otherwise? No comments on this website are private, other perhaps than in orange-name backchannels, and none here are flagged. Those provisos notwithstanding you can see exactly the same discussion I can, and if you felt you could argue other than that it has progressed exactly as I describe, I assume by now you would have essayed the attempt.
Even where it would have offered an advantageous contrast to my supposed hyperbole et al, where do you see sweet reason having told? - when, that is, it comes to the substantive technical critiques of the sort I'm meant to be taken at fault for declining to provide. Those critiques are still being ignored, while you sit here days later still not yet disabused of the idea you are equipped to bandy words with me.
I am not, in short, arguing here with even remotely serious people, and I show them the treatment condign upon their behavior. To do otherwise would serve only to lampoon myself, instead of them. It isn't something I expect to see appreciated by my interlocutors, including you. Its audience, if any, lies elsewhere.
P.S. AFAICT your comment boils down to "I'm being inconsiderate because I think you're idiots". If so, at least you're honest, though you struggle to speak plainly.
I'm being inconsiderate because I'm dealing with people who mistake their opinions for facts and their aesthetics where present for morals, behaviors both well calculated to attract my interest without my respect.
I don't think you're an idiot. I think you're a smug, self-satisfied, deliberately ignorant ratiocinator who rarely understands why he succeeds and never why he fails because he does not really know how to think, although he is very sure that he does. This is the only conversation you and I can have on this website that is interesting to me, at least until you demonstrate some potential otherwise, which by now you seem as unlikely desirous as capable of doing.
If you want to boil all that down to something easier to swallow, then you're welcome. And, yes, I'm well aware that "no u" is as available a response here as previously. Do you think it will avail you more now than then?
