[DoreenMichele]

vapid: offering nothing that is stimulating or challenging.

I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason."

PS there's only one L in my name, not two.

[tptacek]

Among other things, it's a long and careful consideration of the different meanings of "brevity" in a programming language, and every paragraph is heavily cited. It clearly didn't speak to you, and that's fine, but you're wrong about it being vapid.

(Fixed the name thing, sorry about that).

[DoreenMichele]

Then maybe you can do something to help course correct the conversation here other than being dismissive of me, like leave a top level comment that will help people here focus on the parts of it you personally find meaty instead of on the excessively obvious framing of "Waah, I am basically jealous of this man."

[tptacek]

I didn't get "I am basically jealous of this man" from the article, like, at all.

[DoreenMichele]

You have already made it abundantly clear that you disagree with me. Restating that you disagree with me adds nothing to this discussion. We already know you disagree with me. Your personal opinion and my personal opinion differing here is of no real importance to me.

What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you think there is something useful to be gained from the piece, you know a helluva lot more about programming than I do. You are in a much better position than I am to leave a top level comment that will help turn this pile of manure (by which I mean the comments on HN) into something thought provoking and interesting.

I'm in no position to do that.

My goal is to see better discussion here. As someone who has studied things like Social Psychology, I'm only qualified to comment on the defects in this and why it's generating such lousy comments. I'm not qualified to tell people where to look for some meat here and help them focus on that. You are.

[tptacek]

I don't think the way the article is written has nearly as much to do with the comments on this thread as the subject itself, which tends to bring out the worst in the site. I think the article itself is quite well written.

I also think we tend to fall into a trap here of assuming that an article's impact on HN is indicative of its quality. Most people don't write "for" HN, and lots of good stuff doesn't play well here.

[DoreenMichele]

I think the article itself is quite well written.

And yet there isn't a single comment by you engaging directly with the article itself. Only engaging with your opinion that my opinion of it is wrong.

To me this fact only lends further support to my view of what is going on here.

But I don't intend to argue it further. This isn't remedying the problem at all. It isn't somehow leading to better discussion here.