> sorry about "old man"

No worries. I didn't take it personally, but it was kind of a "what kind of argument is that?" moment.

I generally don't think of FUD as an "old man" argument (more like a "man keeping you down" kind of thing ;-), and not really very applicable to a venerable and pervasive language like JavaScript, though I guess Node is newish (and ironically the JavaScript environment I'm most familiar with).

> "Some kid" clearly was directed at me as a person.

I think if you look carefully at the thread, you'll see that the "old man gripes" comment unfortunately presented you as a petulant child and provoked an anti-ageism response from jbooth, which ultimately ended in the "some kid" comment.

I don't think jbooth was trying to make a technical argument at that point; it was indeed personal, and an empty ad hominem, but you unintentionally opened the door for that. Something to keep in mind when processing his comments.

It was a personal argument but it was aimed at a lack of perspective, and not knowing what he doesn't know (a chronic failing of youth, and I'm young myself), rather than an attempt to insult him for it's own sake. As you're hinting at, rather than being upset at me calling him 'some kid', maybe he should wonder why his age is so easy to peg.

He didn't seem to grasp why working with streams of bytes is important in this context, and why extremely spotty/inconsistent support for it is not sufficient. If he had a broader base of experience, or if he was inclined to listen to those who have such experience, maybe he'd get it.