Snark varies mostly by commenter, not by topic, which implies that people do it for personal reasons (e.g. how they're feeling, or habit) and also that it's off-topic, even when the point you're trying to make is not, as with your comment above. It has two bad consequences for HN: it degrades the channel by adding noise, and it acidifies the culture, making it hostile to new work and new ideas. Those are the things we care about.
Many HN users, including me, have gone through the process of figuring this out in our own case and learning to mostly edit the snark (or bile, or dimissiveness) out of our comments. Perhaps you would be willing to do this if you realized what HN is trying to optimize for, which is curiosity—not any of the things you've listed here. I wouldn't want to participate in those either.
Once one realizes that snark is optimizing for a personal discharge at the expense of the community and quality of the site, it becomes fair to edit it out of one's comments, for the same reason one doesn't litter.
By the way that's not snark. That would imply I was being snide, like the first two sentences above, provided for your example. What I called the language was a bastardized version of Lua. There isn't anything subtle about it. What this thread is rife with, though, is ignorance.
I'm getting tired of passive aggressive conversation on HN, and elsewhere. It just promotes bullshit and dismissing others voices if they don't pretty it up for the crowd.
If I said something more like, "Wow, what a wonderful set of features, too bad this breaks syntax highlighting and doesn't support drop-in replacement." Then it might be more palatable, but that's not what I thought, nor how I felt.