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Comment by dewitt | Hacker News Reader

The point the author is trying to make is perhaps a reasonable one, but what an inappropriate communication style. I don't know if the author realizes the tone is so off-putting, but I've found that supportive feedback and constructive criticism goes a lot further in professional environments than name calling and insults. Put another way, if someone on my team at work communicated like that I'd have a conversation with them about more effective approaches less likely to alienate or offend colleagues.

There appears to be an uptick of hyper-agressive technical posts over the past several years. I'm not sure where it started, but I'm hoping it burns itself out soon.

(If you're the author, I apologize for calling you out on this. Nothing personal at all, I just wanted to make the general point about tone.)

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I think that he probably doesn't care if he hurts the fragile feelings of the types of people who think of JavaScript as a "low level" language and probably doesn't want to work at a place that would hire such people.

And I really wouldn't want to work for someone who would refuse to hire an applicant who referred to jQuery as a "framework".

Trick question. I really wouldn't want to work for someone, period :P

Okay... sorry to jump in here.. but low-level means closer to the machine. Assembly, C, etc... "high-level" are further away.. JS is high-level.

that was implicit in my statement

"Supportive feedback and constructive criticism" don't general page views though. :/

Are you insinuating the only way to learn and improve is by being berated?

This link seems relevant here http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunninghams_Law

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Look under DH2.

I didn't find his tone offensive at all, esp as a piece of writing. It's likely that he hears "DOM is slow" all the time, and is venting. And he's a far cry from Zed Shaw's kind of writing.

Consider that the OP itself is already disagreeing with something (the assertion "DOM is slow"). If we apply the rules of your link to the OP, it doesn't even get pass DH1 (the title is already a name call, and later on it uses others).

    “I’m too stupid to know that what I’m doing is stupid”

I agree that the OP's smartass writing style is more annoying than anything else, but I really didn't like the quoted phrase above. Calling someone stupid because they don't know the ins and outs of what is, let's face it, a particularly byzantine system, is just, well...mean.

However, if you'd prefer a critique on the substance of the actual article, I have one of those, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5401340

Look at DH4.

He's saying it's more difficult to convince people of your point if you're being a dick about it. You aren't arguing the central point of his thesis, so I'm unsure what exactly your point is in regards to OP.

As far as I know, PG's post doesn't apply to the original article, as the article starts the discussion, rather than responds to one.

This discussion has being going on for a very long time, even on HN. The article is very much a response to what has come before it. Sure it's a starting point for a thread of discussion we're having here, but it's by no means the _start_ of the debate.

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