[roetlich]

No, the discussion started with a the article from Bun, stating that rust has some technical advantages for them. The response from the Zig creator is a bunch of personal attacks directed at one guy, like calling him a stinky manager. All of these are fully unrelated to which language is better for Bun.

This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.

[jazzypants]

Ad Hominem is only a fallacy when the speaker's personal qualities are irrelevant to the topic at hand. When one man has unilateral control over a project, you have to consider it as an extension of their personality.

[afiori]

To be pedantic the ad hominem fallacy is about trying to deny an argument by attacking the author, so in a discussion about zig Vs rust if Andrew isn't trying to enter the discussion and just argue "that guy was stinky, glad he is gone" is not really an ad hominem, just not classy let's say.

[tomjakubowski]

You're both right: the essay does not really contain ad hominem fallacies, but the essay itself is surely an ad hominem attack, on Jarred as a person. No judgment here, I don't know Jarred or Andrew at all, but like other commenters I did find the closing paragraphs saying the author has no ill-will towards Jarred quite unbelievable.

[roetlich]

> if Andrew isn't trying to enter the discussion

But he is. Both in the title, and in later half of the blog post, he directly enters that discussion. I'm not saying an ad hominem argument is always bad, but this clearly is one.

[miyoji]

> This is like the textbook definition of an ad hominem.

No, it isn't at all. Ad hominem is only in effect and fallacious when the logic turns on the personal attack. "You're wrong because you're stupid" is ad hominem. "You're wrong and also you're stupid" is impolite, but logically fine.

To clarify, I think that the entire "History" section is unrelated to Andrew's argument, only the "Addressing the Blog Post" section actually contains arguments, and that section doesn't contain the rude comments, it's focused on technical decision-making.

[roetlich]

Oh yes, I didn't clarify that I meant an argumentum ad hominem, which isn't the same thing as the informal fallacy of the same name. So yeah, I agree, this isn't directly fallacious.

[rrvsh]

prepending argumentum is literally just expanding the informal name for the fallacy to the full name of "an argument to the person", easily verifiable with one search query. unless you are saying that you were 1. originally just making your own contraction from argumentum ad hominem, 2. normally use latin in online forum comments, 3. often use ad hominem in your own speech to mean a different thing from the common parlance, i think this is an Obvious Fabrication (!!!)

[roetlich]

Love the exclamation marks. So let's just use, for example, this definition: https://www.britannica.com/topic/ad-hominem

Here it's a type of argument, and it's only sometimes a fallacy. Seems like this how it's defined most of the time, unless you explicitly look for "ad hominem fallacy". Ad hominem without any context can be vague, I guess, so I tried to be more explicit.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, English isn't my first language, but I think "Obvious Fabrication" (capital letters) is a bit silly.

[rrvsh]

It's a reference to TFA :)

from your very link:

> ad hominem, type of argument or attack that appeals to prejudice or feelings or irrelevantly impugns another person’s character instead of addressing the facts or claims made by the latter.

> Ad hominem arguments are often taught to be a type of fallacy, an erroneous form of argumentation, although this is not necessarily the case. A number of scholars have noted that questioning a person’s character is a fallacy only insofar as the person’s character is not logically relevant to the debate.

You are right! The link does discuss cases where it's not a fallacy - in those cases, it is instead a valid argument. Again, not what you said.