Comment by tqwhite
9 months ago
Bob's had a long life with too much success. He really believes in himself. But, I have to say that the other guy was aggressive and bad even though I am more inclined to agree with him. He willfully misrepresented Bob's ideas. I thought he presented more misguided certainty than Bob. No Bueno.
The "other guy" is John Ousterhout, author of the Tcl scripting language.
Although I can see why you might consider him more "aggressive", I personally think it matters much more that he was, in general, far more descriptive of his reasoning.
Merely having an opinion is the easy part; being able to clearly articulate the reason(s) why one has a particular opinion is far more important, especially in this kind of conversation, and I in that regard I repeatedly found UB lacking.
I didn't read it as aggressive, more like engaged in the discussion, he really wanted to get to the bottom of things and get his views and opinions challenged, but UB was a bit defensive and closed. Even though UB has strong opinions he wasn't as engaged in building a case for them, he just tried not to budge or maybe he conceded smaller points and then retreated to a less dogmatic stance.