It seems that every time I say something, you feel the need to parrot it back, except that you often get it wrong in a way that shows you just don't get it. For example, after I described a couple of your bogus arguments as rhetorical tricks, you decided to call some of my words rhetoric, when they were simply ridicule. Now that I have found occasion to make a goldfish analogy, for some reason you seem compelled to also mention goldfish, but you do so in a way that quite obviously applies slightly (or exponentially, as you would put it) more to you than me.
This form of discourse, in which one party simply repeats back the claims of the other, as if they were applicable without having anything to support the reversal of attribution, might be called the "no, you are" style, on account of this being a phrase that is commonly used by its main adopters. As it happens, there is a video on that subject, and as you have repeatedly said how much amusement you get out of these exchanges, we can expect this will probably have you rolling on the floor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRx8PFdurgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRx8PFdurgo
With regard to more substantive matters, I think you should know that if you post a link to a claim that was made without any supporting evidence or justification, it does not magically gain those things in consequence. On the other hand, links that did have those things originally retain them, so we can see that your earlier statement
"Sure you could do it that way. But it becomes exponentially more complicated because you need to either stick to one specific implementation of one specific language runtime, or you have to deal with explaining them all." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266387)
stands in contradiction to your later attempted rewrite
"The only claim I made was that your specific explanation (which you never actually wrote), which you said would include stack frames, machine addresses, and the like, would be much more complex than referring to C++, in my opinion." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433742)
Just to be clear, you didn't try limiting it to a statement by me until after you had made the first statement and I pointed out its problems (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269186 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9269186), and not even then, immediately. Only after I showed that you couldn't explain it away as 'conversation' did you try to rewrite it as in the second quote above.
more significantly, you have refused to offer any justification for the phrase "because you need to either stick to one specific implementation of one specific language runtime, or you have to deal with explaining them all", which Eslaught demonstrated to be false, while you are apparently still claiming never to have been wrong.
I repeat my statement that I will present an explanation once you show the courage of your convictions by saying what, in your opinion, is wrong with Eslaught's straight-to-the-point explanation:
"Except you still have no way to modify the variable binding on the caller's stack. This is what all of us in the "Java is call-by-value" camp keep yammering on about: changing a value on the heap (an array or object in Java) is not the same as changing a variable on the stack (a local variable in Java). In Java, you can never touch local variables on parent functions' stacks, therefore, Java cannot be considered pass-by-reference."
You are trying to wriggle out of dealing with this one by making a distinction between "wrong" and "invalid", an act of desperation which underscores that you have run out of ideas. If Eslaught's statement is invalid, then it is wrong as a refutation of your original statement, but you have no argument for that however you choose to put it.
Of course, it is utterly self-serving for someone who tried to dismiss one of his bigger mistakes as 'conversation' to be pedantic over usage now.
One of the more revealing things in your responses are the points you try to ignore. In my previous post I showed that you had made a fundamental error in logic, which you have ignored, so we can add it to the list of mistakes you haven't made. That said, even though your logical error means that the example you gave there is not relevant in the way you claimed, it is worth looking at. As you yourself point out, Solipsism introduces C++ into the discussion and messes it up. That's the best example you can offer of how C++ simplifies the explanation? Really? It's obvious to anyone just how self-serving your arguments are.
Given your copycat tendencies, can we anticipate a video in your next reply? And will it be self-referential? The one thing we can be sure of is that there will be another reply.
I got so excited when I saw the wall of text! I thought, "I will surely be entertained, for there must be some new crazy somewhere in there".
But I was wrong.
You are still going on about old crazy. You still think you can tell someone what their opinion should be, or that they shouldn't use phrases like "exponentially more complex" and "much more complex" without them being incorrectly and repeatedly accused of being contradictory.
And you still think that the confused folks in this thread understand the distinction between "local variable object references" and "the objects they reference", even though you yourself are referring to Solipsism's thread in which he does not understand that even after translating it to a language he is more familiar with?
Sorry mate. But don't despair, I'll give you one more shot. But bring some new crazy please, and shorten up your ramblings a bit.
Or I'm afraid I'm going to lose interest :(
It's good to have the old JJ back! - the one who wasn't afraid to display his impotent apoplexy. It's so much more entertaining (and probably honest) than the faux bonhomie that you rather heavy-handedly affected in your last few responses. I could tell, somehow, that you were still there.
And you return bearing a gift, in the form of your paragraph about Solipsism's comments. Firstly, you are making the logical error of trying to affirm a general claim with a specific instance. This means that the example cannot possibly settle the matter in your favor, but it can still do damage: your best example of the helpfulness of C++ in explaining Java argument-passing is a case where someone used C++ and got it wrong. This is risible, and your statement about Solipsism's familiarity with C++ only makes it more so. Thanks, JJ! While your act of self-implosion makes my opinion moot, I personally would advise Solipsism to read Eslaught's explanation, with special attention to the first paragraph of his last post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249285)
Beyond that, I see you are again trying to rewrite this thread by repeating a couple of excuses that have already been effectively refuted: "it's just my opinion" and "it's just conversation."
You seem to think that calling a statement an opinion immunizes it from being wrong, but it doesn't work that way. An opinion (or set of them) that is self-contradictory is wrong, and similarly, so is an opinion that is contrary to established fact. These opinions are not even worth giving any further consideration; notable examples include flat- and hollow-earth theories, and creationism.
So, putting aside for the moment your self-serving attempt to have everything except your mistakes taken literally, even a 'conversational' reading of "Sure you could do it that way. But it becomes exponentially more complicated because you need to either stick to one specific implementation of one specific language runtime, or you have to deal with explaining them all" finds that you are claiming a stack-frame based explanation will necessarily be inordinately complicated, and even more so when read in its original context (including your precursor posts.) So when you judged (in what is surely a minority self-serving opinion) that Eslaught's explanation was only "slightly" more complex than a C++-based one, you tacitly admitted that your original 'opinion' doesn't hold water. As soon as I pointed out that you had done this, you changed your opinion of Eslaught's explanation, now claiming that it was invalid in some way. Not only was this itself a change in your stated opinion (and a dead giveaway that you knew this to be so), but you created a contradiction with your first evaluation of Eslaught's explanation: if it is being judged as slightly more complicated than the one you prefer, then it is has already passed muster (and nobody but you would question that, anyway.) This is just one more example of how your attempt to claim you have made no mistakes has led you into making more.
But the idea that you are merely presenting your opinion is itself an attempt to rewrite the record. Your original claim was to have made no mistakes, and you only tried to pass your mistakes off as opinion, and thereby claim for them an imaginary immunity from being evaluated, once you realized your factual claims did not stand up. For example, take the clause following "because" in the first quote above. In the context of its use (i.e, following "because"), it has only one purpose: you are presenting this as a basis in fact for your claim of complexity (and also perhaps that you meant 'exponentially' literally, even though it doesn't work as such; whether you are a reliable reporter of your opinions is an issue we will get to later (hint: you are not even a reliable reporter of what is in the record for all to see.)) The 'because' clause is a factual claim refuted by Eslaught, and this in turn shows that even if the cause before 'because' is taken 'conversationally', the statement as a whole is contrary to fact.
We can tell where you know you are wrong by your repeated avoidance of the issue, and the above "because" clause and Eslaught's explanation are two of the more blatant and repeated cases (the latter after your backfiring attempt to dismiss it.) Because we can see that you know you are wrong, and yet continue to insinuate that my refutations are faulty without daring to make definitive claims, we have to conclude that you are probably dissembling, which in turn means that we cannot necessarily take any of your statements about what your opinions were at face value, and can only go on what you wrote - which is the way it started anyway, despite your attempt to rewrite this discussion as one about your opinions.