In other essays, Zach Tellman has made the point that Clojure is unique in that it’s syntax allows it’s written to form to almost exactly represent its AST tree. The comparison then is between Arc and Clojure and between Paul Graham and Rich Hickey. Both men wrote essays about programming which seemed to promise new ideas but Hickey delivered real innovations whereas we can now see that Graham was unable to deliver. And Graham’s failure is in part traceable to his inability to make explicit what he actually knows, or why he believes the things that he asserts.

The debate over how to make tacit knowledge explicit is important. The debate over what constitutes good programming is important to the whole tech industry. I’m astonished that you would think this essay was merely a matter of gossip.

It’s possible that Tellman should have repeated some of his earlier essays, to give more context to his remarks, but this is the Web, so he embedded hyperlinks to some of the previous discussions.

I'm someone who finds social stuff very interesting. I mostly don't like gossip rags and a lot of psychological studies are essentially useless garbage.

What value does this article really provide? Does it tell us where you can look out for Paul Graham's personal biases in order to get more value out of his writing? Does it propose better answers to anything in particular?

This amounts to jealousy or something and it reminds me of an old comic strip where the punch line was to the effect of "After 12 straight hours online this woman is going You People Need To Get A Life!"

You take a class with each.

From the Very Great professor you get several maxims that don’t seem to actually help you, nor can you figure out how to apply them to your work.

From the Ordinary Great professor you get a bunch of advice that you can easily apply to your own work, and you feel that you’ve immediately improved in the subject.

Is it jealousy to then say the Very Great professor seems to have a reputation that exceeds his actual skill?

That’s how I read the comparison of Graham to Hickey.

It’s an important issue, especially if Very Great has a prominent position in the industry and is using that prominence in harmful ways.

But if you look at the overall pattern of behavior, the real point is to attack or exclude a particular person or particular group of people.

Among other things I've had a college class in Social Psychology. I object to a gossipy piece of garbage getting so many upvotes on HN while bringing down the quality of discussion here.

If you find something meaty in his analysis of pg's work, then why don't you comment on that instead of arguing with me?

If my comments here are so off the mark, why do they have so much attention? This piece is failing to generate meaty discussion. It's mostly generating hot takes about Paul Graham and not commentary on the criticism of his work because the framing of the piece doesn't really fit with the idea that it's about criticizing his work.

If it were really about criticizing his work, what we should see here is debate about whether or not that criticism holds water. And I'm not really seeing that.

I've proposed a remedy: That someone -- anyone -- more knowledgeable than me about programming should leave a top level comment engaging with the actual meat of the article. There's no reason it can't be you.

Engaging further with my comments is not a remedy for what I feel the issue is. And engaging with my comments specifically because they are mine is just adding to the problem.

I commented on the matter because I've studied social phenomenon and I see a negative social pattern here and because I value HN for its high quality discussion. This article is mostly failing to foster good quality discussion. The primary focus has been on Paul Graham and not on something more substantive, like his writing, his ideas or his work.

After I left my remarks, people began leaving remarks that deny that this is an ad hominem attack on Paul Graham. That's problematic because it means the focus remains on Paul Graham. In discussing whether or not it is an ad hominem, the focus remains on pg, not on something more substantive.

It's a little like when I used to argue with someone and say "All you do is talk about you and I am not even a part of this discussion" and the reply was "I'm sorry. I'm a dirt bag. I'm a terrible person. I'm a lousy excuse for a human being." Like, I wasn't asking the person to attack themselves. I was asking them to include me in the discussion. Going from "Me. Me. Me." to "Negative things about me, me, me." doesn't fundamentally change the fact the topic is still "me."

It really shouldn't matter to you too much that it's me saying this -- unless it helps you figure out what my point really is. If you look at my comments and think to yourself "She has studied social phenomenon a lot more than she has studied programming and her observation is about quality of discussion here and I can see that" -- cool. Other than using what you know about me to help you understand my point, it shouldn't matter that I'm the author of the comment.

If you think that the substance of the article should be discussed, then go discuss it. If you think it's basically an ad hominem on Paul Graham, the best thing to do is ignore it.

I'm trying to step away from this discussion. Me being here is only deepening the issue that I dislike. It's not remedying it.

(And DoreenMichele is quite wrong about this post; right or wrong, one thing it clearly is not is "vapid").

I'm failing to see this generate meaty discussion here. I am currently seeing mostly lots of flagged to death or grayed out comments, likely because it's basically gossip and mud slinging and not really anything more than "Some guy has a bee in his bonnet about Paul Graham for some reason."

PS there's only one L in my name, not two.

(Fixed the name thing, sorry about that).

What does bother me is that this article is generating so many grayed out and downvoted comments because of the manner in which it was written. If you think there is something useful to be gained from the piece, you know a helluva lot more about programming than I do. You are in a much better position than I am to leave a top level comment that will help turn this pile of manure (by which I mean the comments on HN) into something thought provoking and interesting.

I'm in no position to do that.

My goal is to see better discussion here. As someone who has studied things like Social Psychology, I'm only qualified to comment on the defects in this and why it's generating such lousy comments. I'm not qualified to tell people where to look for some meat here and help them focus on that. You are.

I also think we tend to fall into a trap here of assuming that an article's impact on HN is indicative of its quality. Most people don't write "for" HN, and lots of good stuff doesn't play well here.

And yet there isn't a single comment by you engaging directly with the article itself. Only engaging with your opinion that my opinion of it is wrong.

To me this fact only lends further support to my view of what is going on here.

But I don't intend to argue it further. This isn't remedying the problem at all. It isn't somehow leading to better discussion here.

Anything that Zach Tellman writes is going to get attention simply because Tellman has a following that takes him seriously.