[tikhonj]

When somebody reads that X is better than what they're using or that X is the "next big thing", they're liable to feel this as a personal attack. It's like their choices were wrong--they should have gone with X instead. This isn't usually how the articles about X are actually meant to be read, but it's how some people see them nonetheless.

Now, these people are feeling slighted (however unfairly). They're not going to drop everything and pick up X. Fair enough: jumping to every shiny new technology would be madness. But chances are they won't even bother learning about X properly. Instead, they want some plausible sounding reason about why X is not all it's cracked up to be, about why they're actually smarter for not using it than vice versa, about why it's all just more hype. They want to stick it to those smug X-using bastards.

So they vote up critical articles that just happen to be written coherently, regardless of how accurate they may actually be. And so we get dross on the front page. Happily, the HN comments tend to paint a much better picture: they simultaneously debunk the original argument while exploring the actual upsides and downsides to X. With these sort of articles, the contents are worth far more than the actual blog posts.

X here is anything from Scala to NoSQL to functional programming. The recent article about what is wrong with FP and OOP is a perfect example of this, which annoyed me in particular. And yet, I think this sort of thing is virtually inevitable if functional programming is to grow and become more popular, so it's more than a worthy sacrifice.