As for Pony, I'm not here to defend it or explain it ... I simply responded to casual dismissals of it on trivial grounds.
> I can't flag that outrageous personal attack and no one else has.
Why wouldn't you be able to flag it? And there's no flagged counter, it's not possible for ordinary users to tell how many times a post has been flagged or not.
I think there is a fundamental gap in communication. Your actual point is not coming across at all, anywhere in this thread.
That's why you're getting downvoted.
"For Pony in particular, the syntax is not important ... it's simply not the point of the language."
You said that in direct response to someone who was wanting to see the syntax. While I do appreciate that it's not strictly speaking necessary in the context of your reply, it doesn't communicate at all why syntax isn't important to the pony language. You're just making a definitive statement unsupported by anything. Context or even a brief explanation would have been extremely helpful and almost certainly avoided all of this fuss. Your response, given without any context as to why syntax isn't important for pony, was actually harmful, rather than useful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44728708
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44722043
It's laudable to want work like Pony to get discussed in terms of the most interesting things about it, but the best way to do this is to describe and explain more of what's interesting. It's not helpful to comment about how bad other comments are, and certainly not to cross into attack. Those things feed flamewars, as unfortunately happened badly in this thread. That's what we're most trying to avoid.