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Comment by madrobby | Hacker News Reader

I'm Thomas Fuchs. That's interesting. How many apps have you developed?

I'm not sure if you intended it, but this comment seems extremely egotistical.

Are you genuinely interested in his/her experience and having a conversation about it, or are you saying (as it seems to read), "How many apps have YOU developed?"

If it's the latter, you're being kind of a dick. Just saying.

NB: My husband isn't a native English speaker. His point was that he wrote about our experience with a specific app and that the bulk of jacquesc's argument was "Thomas rails like a zealot" and implies Thomas is an old dead horse (?), and otherwise was basically "nuh-uh." Without supporting detail.

It was an invitation to provide details instead of ad hominem attacks (speaking of being kind of a dick). Because his native language isn't English, this got a little bit mangled. I already pointed that out to him.

Also he wanted to say he was the original author, and it ended up sounding like a line from an action movie.

I'm sorry for calling Tom a zealot (which I've since removed).

If it makes you feel better, I'm a client side MVC zealot. For Aiur!

I can see how my comment could be taken this way. It's not want I wanted to express. I wanted to state, as a disclaimer, that I'm the author of the post.

As for answering the comment, it's really more of an ad hominem so that's why I wrote the snarky "That's interesting".

I am interested in what he developed though, especially as he's so sure of his one true way.

A few. Don't worry, I'm a fan of your work. But I think you're way off base on this one point.

We can still be friends :)

Nope, we aren't - and won't be. Friends don't use ad hominem attacks on friends.

Bummer. Well, I guess all I can say it's nothing personal. I thought I was arguing against Thomas's opinion (which I disagree with), and his constant attacks against any JS framework over 2K in size.

Best of luck with your ventures.

In case anyone reading this exchange isn't privy to the facts of the matter:

Thomas doesn't "constantly" "attack" libraries "over 2k in size."

He's a core team member of Prototype, wrote/"founded" Scriptaculous, scripty2, and Zepto. All significantly larger than 2k. All different types of frameworks, libraries. All of which we use.

What Thomas does is promote smaller, more modular libraries -- based on experience. He promotes them because large libraries dominated the market utterly, and monocultures are not productive for hackers. So he started http://microjs.com.

Some people like to characterize him as a zealot for promoting an alternative and talking about why huge frameworks/libraries often have more tradeoffs than benefits.

I guess after writing Prototype with it's 2GB source it's understandable that one would become a promoter of smaller, modular libraries ;)

I'm myself a supporter of small libs, actually wrote a zepto "competitor" to be compatible with IE9 [1], but get the impression everyone is being a little too defensive (offensive?) on the matter.

[1] http://ryejs.com

Your reply is about as good as his comment.

Not when you consider the original blog post, which addressed the question of "Why not let the server be the data store?" Among the other "points"[1] jacquesc raised.

[1] anyone who wants to pretend to have a serious, rational discussion -- don't start it by calling the person a zealot. Bam! Insta-noncredibility.

recuter, put down your weapons and surrender. you're surrounded!

To be fair, he said he was "railing like a zealot" -- a subtle but important difference. Calling someone a zealot is attacking them as a person, calling their behavior "zealot-like" is only attacking the behavior.

Ah, yes, one word changes characterizations like "railing" and "zealot" into… a slightly (slightly) subtler ad hominem. But still an ad hominem.

Whoever's down voting me, see Jacques' line about editing his own comment to be less inflammatory. He admitted it. You're not achieving anything here.

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