Of all the posts pointing what Jeff's flaw in logic was. The one post attacking his person instead, saying he's just a mindless bully that should be ignored. Is the most insightful?
Yes, because that's how life goes. I'm not going to attack the logic of an article that is illogical, I'm going to talk about the hypocrisy of the person writing it. The human stuff matters much more than the fantasy world of "logic".
I'm not going to attack the logic of an article that is illogical
It seems to me that is the exactly the type of article you'd want to attack in that way.
If you won't attack arguments with faulty logic on logical grounds, and you can't (correctly) attack arguments with correct logic on logical grounds, that implies you can never refute anyone logically, and that all your arguments will be ad hominems and suchlike.
That makes sense to me. But I also think maybe Zed is saying something along the lines of that proverb, "Don't argue with a fool," and that when it comes to people who are unreasonable it's sometimes easier to point out that they're generally unreasonable. (Though I see your point in that this bad in the same way any generalizations can be bad.)
You confuse self-interest with hypocrisy. I am definitely self-interested and openly admit it, but I try not to be a hypocrite.
For example, I think people should spend their lives learning new things. After I write a few more comments on HN, I'm going to grab my guitar and go learn a new scale. :-)
So, your motive for attack on Jeff is self-interest?
edit: an elaboration
I'm trying to figure out what exactly Jeff wrote that you hate so much. You don't even consider his arguments, you just have "a guess about Jeff, and a general message about other people who feel the same way."
Jeff wouldn't write something like this:
"Don't listen to the hipsters who claim that coding is as vital as reading, and who claim that for the first time in the history you can learn to code, because now we have an online JavaScript course that we call "Code Year" or something like that.
But that is what I've got from his post. He's not against people learning to code, he's against making it into something that it simply isn't - a vital life skill.
I believe it is a vital skill, but that it's not being taught well enough so that's why people don't think it is. The same could be said about nearly everything we teach in K-12 at some point in the subject's history.
Also, it's not an attack, it's a counter-attack. People really need to get their order of events in the right order of events.
"The same could be said about nearly everything we teach in K-12 at some point in the subject's history"
I've been teaching for 25 years in post 18 colleges in the UK, and I have the granddaughter of one of my first students in my class now (god I feel old, my consolation is that granny was a mature student in her late 20s/early 30s when she did maths with me).
Many of my students are earning money from jobs that did not exist when I was teaching them.
Stuff changes, but learning how to think does not. There is a tension between the synthetic and the analytic, and we need both. Teenagers need to learn attention to detail, and the big picture, and time planning, and the focusing of attention. The school syllabus in every country is a political compromise that shifts over time.
I think a little space for end user style programming might help with the analytic and synthetic modes a little.
Challenge: Learn Puredata the hard way, let's do the attention to detail thing your books do to music by constructing sound?
Although, I'm still with Jeff regarding the importance of coding, I want to thank you for clarifying your position and the order of events. Happy hacking.
He also provides all of his books, in their entirety, for free on his website. He even lets you see his "beta" books, Learn C the Hardway, Learn SQL The Hardway, etc.
He isn't insulting Jeff as a person, nor is he even accusing him of deliberately being a hypocrite. He's just accusing him of a single instance of hypocritical behavior.
Also people who won't listen to Jeff anymore because of this post, or are really angry at him, are likely being hypocritical. He's making the same sort of a mistake as a blogger that many will make as a programmer, especially if we don't discriminate who gets to try their hand at programming. He didn't ship this out to some scary production place where the blogging equivalent of exposing private data for thousands of user accounts might happen. He just blogged it. Likewise, for the most part, new programmers will be limited in the amount of damage they can do.