I'd be happier to have this conversation privately but there isn't much of an option when accounts have no email address. I bet I could convince you of the below if we were sitting opposite one another over a fine beer, but this channel is pretty limited. But let me try.

I like and appreciate a great many of your comments and think you're a net positive contributor to HN, who has significantly enhanced the intellectual diversity of the site over the years (on a lot of things if not programming languages!). Unfortunately, your comments have also often been abrasive in a way that at best skirts the HN guidelines and sometimes plainly violates them. I wish you would work on eliminating that.

On a large public forum, when someone is a good writer and makes cogent points and is abrasive, it gives license to everyone who isn't a good writer and doesn't make cogent points to just (begging your pardon) pee in the pool. It's a destabilizing influence. Being right makes it worse.

Considering that what we're shooting for on HN is an internet version of reversing the arrow of entropy, i.e. hard, I wish you'd join in with that and help. It would benefit you too, since the community would suck less. Other users have done so. I'm one of them; I used to deliberately mix a little abrasion into my HN comments because I thought they would be lukewarm without it and I value lively language. But that was before I understood the dynamics of a large public forum. A large public forum has to be a bit bland because otherwise the riffraff will ruin it.

Re the current thread? I doubt it makes sense to litigate the details, but FWIW I at most partly agree with the author. I think Lisp metaprogramming has significant advantages, but he overstated his case, and that plus being rude, then lashing out at downvoters, is guaranteed to attract more downvotes. Your comments were less rude and advocated a more conventional view, so it isn't surprising that users preferred them. I mentioned the rudeness on both sides not to equate the two, but to point out that the HN guidelines still apply even when one is being provoked. In fact that's when they apply most. Otherwise everyone can invoke the "I merely" defense and down we all go.

>I wish you would work on eliminating that.

I'll give it a try!

(I'm from a place that we like our debates heated and our coffee iced :-)).

And yet you keep proving that you in particular still cannot understand what static metaprogramming is, even after all my patient, kind explanations. So I was right after all.