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Comment by angrybits | Hacker News Reader

The first half-dozen of those paragraphs were just him saying words, none of them really had anything to do with the subject at hand. Kind of like a very poor attempt at strawman arguments. "DHH accused us of being violent extremists burninating the countryside! I have not heard of any of that happening so it must be him using pejoratives."

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I think there's an important, unspoken point he was rebutting. When DHH uses the word fundamentalist, it conjures a vauge notion in our mind. "oh, I get it those TDD people are just a cult. I'm sure they're just going to predictably respond to this with their closed minded mentality." I'll admit this is somewhat how I felt when reading DHH's article. This sort of intro breaks down that expectation in the reader.

It's not just about meaning of the words, it affects the reader's biases. Basically, it's countering one rhetorical tactic with another.

I'm not quite sure what the name of the fallacy is, but I've seen this "technique" used often before. Make a lot of noise about the specific word or words being used, rather than arguing a valid counter-argument yourself.

If the author had left out the first 8 or so paragraphs, this might have been worth reading and sharing. As it stands? I don't see why it's nearing the top of the front page.

The fallacy is called '911'. It is a corollary of Godwin's Law.

Which is deliciously ironic considering the first 8 paragraphs are exponentially more hyperbolic and sensational than anything in the original post.

Most of the points seem to fall under PG's first and second levels of disagreement: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

If you dig through Bob's post, he does have a decent enough point - the purpose of tests is to feel confident about refactoring and deploying code, such that your development team can work quickly. I totally agree with that point. It's just a shame the point was buried.

You don't know the name, because he's not using a logical fallacy. He's addressing DHH's rhetorical device of loaded words. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_language)

See also the pleasingly named Weasel Words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word

It really distracted from the main point, too much ranting. By the time the TDD argument started, I already forgot what the entire thing was predicated on...

and ... you have to wonder if the rest of the post can recover its credibility, or whether it will continue as an unreasoned rant.

and then goes on a rant that lasts half the blog post.

When a blog contains this...

>To my knowledge no one seriously teaches abstinence only sex education.

... you have to wonder if the rest of the post can recover its credibility, or whether it will continue as an unreasoned rant.

Yeah, and for that matter "fundamentalism" has been associated with certain elements of the Christian right (like biblical literalism) at least since the 90's.

In fact, if someone were to use the term 'fundamentalism' in any other way I'd be a bit annoyed at them for obfuscating the conversation by using a word in a non-idiomatic fashion.

And still, he failed to put forward a meaningful rebuttal to DHH's criticism of TDD.

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