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by xelxebar 614 days ago
First off, thanks for continuing this exchange with me. Text communication between strangers is fraught with miscommunication perils left and right, so hanging in there is a really nice gesture. Cheers.

It's so weird, though. Everything disagreeable you point out with my comments, I kind of feel like is true of GP's comment. It casually dismisses the content of OP, injecting a strawman about a "metrics". Wore still, it just touts normative and relatively mainstream opinions about better vs. worse thing, without even offering up a hint as to what these supposed metrics are supposed to be measuring.

That's a dick move, IMHO, and a common one at that in these array language posts. I think we as a community do ourselves a disservice by allowing ourselves to propagate such echo chambers.

Which is all a pretty different message than @arcfide (eloquently) attempts.

Please note that nowhere do I attack GP or GP's comment specifically. If you're inclined to reread my comments, please note that I really do try hard to delineate ideas and cultural trends as the target. Heck, I even own up to being part of those trends and culture. Where you have thought I say "you", try rereading it as "we".

Anyway, cheers!

1 comments

I appreciate that your tone is softening with me, and that you took the time to mention some positives. De-escalating from a potential misunderstanding is the right way to go.

I’ve reread your comments, and they still read like an attack to me, while the top comment does not. You may feel like you’ve drawn a line, but the implications you made were quite clear. Calling it a dick move is a more direct attack, and talking about how it offends you tends to demonstrate that you have been and still are in fact attacking. Using strong language in a direct reply and talking about how wrong the mentality is is always going to be taken as an attack on the comment you’re replying to.

Personally I feel like the “one line” part of the article title is intentionally provocative, and as such, it invites critique, which is what the top comment is. It’s both impressive to fit a sudoku solver on one (short) line, and also at the same time, making a claim that can’t be fairly compared to other languages. As such, it is fair to point out that there’s a more universal way to evaluate the size of Arthur Whitney’s solution that is more compatible with other languages, and combined with the fact that everyone (including you?) already agrees that lines of code aren’t a good metric for anything, it’s not clear why you’ve taken such issue with that casual comment.

The article, disappointingly, doesn’t explain Whitney’s solution in words that non K readers can understand. At a glance, I would assume it’s a more or less brute force search over all possible sudoku boards and then matching against the cells, rows, and columns rules. In a way then, Whitney’s solver might be seen as a succinct statement of the rules of sudoku, which are indeed relatively short in any language.

Oh well. It's clear you read my posts as personal or uncouth attacks. I genuinely disagree and tried to explicate intent clearly, but c'est la vie. IMHO, it's helpful to separate out ideas and actions from identity, freeing us to deal with the former without mercy as needed.

That said, this exchange will definitely bounce around in my subconscious, so whether or not I explicitly agree, you've definitely moved the needle!

Anyway, whatever happened here, it was a genuine meeting of minds, so much obliged fellow HNer. Be well.