Comment by DonaldPShimoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonaldPShimoda | Hacker News Reader

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I don't understand this brand of comment, which seem to be fairly prevalent here on HN.

Are you saying that you prefer babashka to zuo? Have you actually used zuo? Or did you only want to pontificate on another project with a potentially related goal, but without actually connecting those dots for readers of your comment?

My issue (not quite the right word, but close enough) with this kind of comment is it's kind of rude, in my opinion? Like, imagine if you were standing around with some people, and somebody said "I just learned about Zuo! It's this neat Racket alternative that's very small. It's a super cool project, and I've really enjoyed it!" And you reply with "When I want a small Lisp, I use babashka." And you don't connect it to the conversation at hand, and it's up to the other people to figure out what your point is. It's like... it's almost a non sequitur, in some sense. And comments like these seem super common here for some reason. It just kinda rubs me the wrong way, though I guess judging by their prevalence they are not seen this way by most people here, so perhaps my perception is in the wrong.

Not the commenter you replied to, but I see where you are coming from. I see things differently though, I like comments like the above because if I'm interested in Zuo or scripting lisp/scheme in general, I like finding related projects in the comments. I guess I read comments like those as if they started with an implicit "if the topic interests you, here are related things".

> I guess I read comments like those as if they started with an implicit "if the topic interests you, here are related things".

Hmm maybe I should try to read them that way and I'd be less bothered. Still, I wish they would actually explicitly say as much. It's only a few words, but (in my opinion) it feels like it completely shifts the tone from "the tool this article is about is useless, use this other tool instead" to an educational/helpful thing, which is much nicer.

I think this is another case where the fact that you can't get a person's tone of voice via text causes people to take things the wrong way.

As another person said of themselves, I like the fact that people on HN point to other tools they use in a way that is related to the one being discussed in the comments. That makes HN a good place to find out about tools you hadn't heard of.

I didn't think the original comment was intended to be dismissive of zuo, but they were just pointing out their preference for a tool in that vein (which made sense to me since both are lisp-ish languages made for shell scripting).

I definitely see where you're coming from, but I think what gets me is that a lot of these comments don't actually know much about the specific tool being discussed; they just talk about a related tool instead.

If the parent commenter had said, e.g., "Zuo seems to have chosen to do X to address issue Foo, but this other tool took approach Y instead, and I like that better" — well that seems a lot more constructive, and on-topic. But just saying "I use <other tool>" is like... it doesn't belong. It's off-topic, in a way? Not strictly speaking, but enough so that it makes me a bit uncomfortable. It gives me vibes of, like... questioning the subject tool's "right to exist", so to speak, because "why would I use <tool the article is about> when I already know <other tool>!" without actually showing any effort to understand the differences.

I dunno if I'm explaining my thoughts here well. It's not a huge deal, and I definitely have also found some of these comments to be useful in the past, but their general tone rubs me the wrong way just slightly and I thought maybe it was worth commenting on.

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