> That's not technical criticism. To be clear that particular phrase wasn't direct technical criticism - but it was embedded in an article that was largely tec

> That's not technical criticism. To be clear that particular phrase wasn't direct technical criticism - but it was embedded in an article that was largely technical and it was in direct support of the technical arguments (essentially "it ended up like that because no compilers, streaming or not, existed yet"). I think you should look carefully at the definition of ad hominem. You say that the author couldn't have known what he was asserting. Maybe, sure! That doesn't relate to it being an ad hominem though (it would make it simply false). You say the worse are deprecating. I don't really agree, but even if they were that doesn't by itself make it an ad-hominem. Ad hominem needs all three factors: _personal_, _irrelevant_ and _an attack_. I think you can make very good arguments that it was not an attack and certainly that it was not irrelevant. I would even argue it's not personal, since it is not an about a personal characteristic of any person, but simply an observation about what point in time an event took place. Like if I said "you were FLYING BLIND because you had to decide whether to take you umbrella before knowing the weather at your destination", it is not even a personal thing: just observing that you had to decide before you had all the information.