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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

It's scary to think that this guy who was just shocked to discover a very basic concept of object oriented programming (polymorphism) has written his own book on iOS programming:

http://clayallsopp.com/posts/writing-a-programming-book

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I think this comment is a little unwarranted. Polymorphism wasn't the concept he discovered - the idea of generating the classes (metaprogramming) and the "clever" (well, some would say so at least) was interesting to him.

I also don't like how your comment tries to make fun of his efforts to learn something new.

> I also don't like how your comment tries to make fun of his efforts to learn something new.

The problem is not that he's learning, he's teaching.

Why is that a problem? As I pointed out, he's just showed us a metaprogramming trick he thought was cool. That is no indication that he is an inept programmer or someone that should be allowed to teach something like RubyMotion (if he was writing a book on metaprogramming, that's another thing).

No problem at all, I was talking about the book. Even if he hasn't lied, when one reads the "author" section, it sounds like he's an expert. In the description of the book it also says it can help you even if you are a "veteran", which might be true (or not), but makes one think he is a veteran too. It's misleading.

What, teachers should never learn?

Metaprogramming isn't a basic part of any programmer's education.

The basics? Yes they should learn that, years before starting to teach.

How many books did you wrote ?

That's not an Ad Hominem.

I assume you are responding to me. Yes, yes it is. From Wiki "Argumentum ad hominem, is an argument made personally against an opponent instead of against their argument." AlexeyBrin is implying that because greenyoda may not have written any programming books, that his argument is less valid. AlexeyBrin's argument is not refuting greenyoda's central point, that it's somewhat strange that the blog post author has written a programming book about Ruby, despite not being aware of what some argue are the language's commonly used features.

Sorry; I was actually responding to AlexeyBrin on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5157519

Sorry for the confusion ;)

Ah, the good ol' ad hominem.

I did write about twelve books and I still consider OP's point to be very valid.

The blog entry is great in that it shows how collaborating over the Internet can lead to improvement but it's indeed a bit concerning that someone who didn't know what polymorphism was had been publishing a programming book.

Clay wrote a book about RubyMotion (a Ruby compiler for iOS), not a book that teaches OOP. His knowledge about polymorphism is not so relevant for this book (I think he "knows" what polymorphism is but he was genuinely amazed by the way you can use it for this particular case).

> very valid

Validity is a binary state. Don't modify it with an adverb.

How is that relevant?

Just pointing that his little ad hominem attack has no place on HN.

It would be an ad hominem if the book was about gardening but it's not, it's about programming.

"He is the creator of some of the most widely used RubyMotion libraries"

Then everyone is surprised when critical bugs come to light in Ruby stuff.

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