[pawelkowal]

The lack of empathy in your comment is exactly what ends up pushing people (like me) away from functional languages.

Your comment just points what is wrong, without any help to guide those who would like to know more, be them the author or a reader. It is interesting because you just dismissed everything the article was about: being empathetic and providing guidance.

For the curious, I understand a pure functional language one that explicitly marks all side-effects, for example, by using monads. So Elixir indeed does not seem to be a pure language. More information can be found on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purely_functional

[theseoafs]

I didn't "dismiss" anything. In fact, I didn't bring up anything about the article other than this one factual inaccuracy. Moreover I pointed out why it wasn't purely functional when someone asked me. What else do I need to do in order to be a good commenter in your eyes?

[peregrine]

Check the HN guidelines re-comments https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[theseoafs]

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

This is exactly what I did. The author made an error, which I corrected without any other commentary or name-calling, and which the author then corrected. This is the only guideline which is relevant to what I wrote.