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Comment by throwanem

6 months ago

So this all started when you replied to me opining thusly:

> I was asked for an opinion and I gave one. Don't make too much of it. Rails devotees can't stand hearing a bad word about their baby, they always make a fuss.

I quote my own initial comment here, unabridged and verbatim, for the sake of adjacency with the following question: Where in this do you find a complaint?

That's a substantive question, not merely a rhetorical one. I would characterize my tone in that quote accurately as dismissive and uncharitably as contemptuous. But for the way you've talked about it now at such length, I can conclude only that I gave a mistaken impression of uncomprehending dismay. I don't understand how that could be so, given I literally do proffer an explanation for the behavior I'm meant not to comprehend; that explanation might be inaccurate and attract criticism accordingly, but to behave as though required to piece things together de novo is unwarranted. It's inconsistent to argue both that I must not understand the effect I create and that I must set out to create it, don't you think? Yet that's pretty much where you seem to end up.

You having concluded otherwise, ie that there is some essential ignorance here on my part requiring your effort to redress, I therefore ask on what basis you so conclude - the better to avoid again wasting my time, and incidentally also someone else's, in such fashion as this. Good grief, if I could've corrected that misapprehension right up front, we could've dispensed with everything after, to no doubt mutual preference.

And if you'll forgive myself quoting myself from earlier in the conversation, one more time:

> Meanwhile detailed and substantive technical critiques provided by other users - critiques of the sort I learned a decade ago not to bother making - go totally ignored as I knew that they would.

The people you refer to as "devotees" who "can't stand hearing a bad word" strike me as ordinary users whose personal experience simply contradicts your claims. The absolutism of those claims played a part. If you see someone say "X is impossible", but you have personally seen X occur, it's natural to want to correct the record.

  • That isn't really an answer, or not one at least on point. You're saying my approach made people angry and they responded in a way influenced by that anger, again as though I were unaware. But I have been having this conversation for well over a decade now, nearly 15 years. You will forgive me if I do not always behave as though it were my first time, especially when disingenuousness on the part of my interlocutors has been such a constant over that span.