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You seem to start your posts with a lot of rhetoric, and then you repeatedly fall flat on your face with substance. > you had tacitly admitted to a complete re

You seem to start your posts with a lot of rhetoric, and then you repeatedly fall flat on your face with substance. > you had tacitly admitted to a complete reversal of your position > until you can demonstrate the integrity of committing to something definite My position has never changed, nor has my opinion. I still believe C++ was a useful analogy to the problem at hand (people misunderstanding Java references and pass-by-reference), and I still believe that any explanation involving machine addresses and stack frames that you could write (which you continue to refuse to do) would be more complex than comparing to C++. If you care to take your umpteenth failed swing at that, go right ahead. I already know what's going to happen though. "Failed attempt at rhetoric, misrepresenting of opponent's position, arguing against the failed position". I should advise you, though, that if you are going to keep wasting your own time flailing around in this thread, you should try to have a modicum of self-respect by sticking to what I say in your replies. Arguing against positions that don't exist may make you feel like you are getting somewhere, but really all you are doing is entertaining me. But if that's your goal, and I'm misunderstanding you, then ignore the previous paragraph, and keep it coming :)

mannykannot 11y ago
So I have been advised by jj not to continue. Coincidentally, in what I think was an unrelated yet eerily similar experience, a squirrel hissed at me from its tree while I was running today. Once again, you attempt to rewrite the record, this time with a bland statement that you might now wish you had limited yourself to, but so long as you insist that you have not changed your mind on anything, then then I have the option to mention the various arguments you have offered for what was a much more emphatic position - to give just one example: "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. Neither is ideal." That is not just "more complex", and it is not just an opinion, it contains an argument (an apparently faulty one, but an argument nevertheless.) So long as you continue to deceptively misrepresent your former opinions and statements, there is no point in me posting an alternative here for it to be similarly misrepresented, but I will repeat my offer to do so if a third party gets involved. As most of your last post was devoted, once again, to claiming (without any attempt at justification) that I don't have a leg to stand on, it seems negligent of you to omit making an attempt at a refutation of even one of the many points I have raised in the course of this thread - anyone would think that it is yourself who you are actually describing. I am sure it is just an oversight, so here's one example for you to tackle, left unanswered from the very post you were replying to: what do you think is wrong with eslaught's explanation?
- jjnoakes 11y ago
  > what do you think is wrong with eslaught's explanation? Who said anything was wrong with it? All I ever said about it was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393447 Which says nothing about it being wrong. In fact, to back up my opinion that his post is slightly more complex, and perhaps harder to understand, here's a thread where I in fact use an even simpler explanation than eslaught's, and the person I was explaining this to still didn't get it. Even they brought up C++ to try to clarify their position, and it turns out that by doing so they actually ended up proving themselves wrong. So in at least one concrete case, using C++ was actually better (more precise with fewer words and examples). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9248590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9248590 But I really did mean that I was entertained by watching you make stuff up and repeatedly fail at whatever your goal is, so by all means, don't stop now :)
  - mannykannot 11y ago
    It is said that for a goldfish, each turn around its bowl is a new experience, because it remembers nothing of its previous circuits. You appear to be in the same situation, unaware that each claim you make is contradicted by something you wrote earlier. Take, for example, "all I ever said about it was this". What you actually did was first make the claim you are now repeating, and then, when I pointed out that doing so completely contradicted your original position, you changed your mind and decided that Eslaught's explanation was irrelevant (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433742). Now that I have asked on what grounds you consider it to be irrelevant, you have circled back around to your original position, creating a lose-lose situation in which you have contradicted yourself regardless of what your actual opinion is. You have reached the point of creating epicycles of contradictions within contradictions, as all this is going on within your larger contradiction of first claiming inordinate complexity of any alternative to your approach and then trying to rewrite that as being merely a claim that there is necessarily some slight increment in complexity in avoiding C++. Let's look again at what you actually wrote: "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 That is not a claim of just slightly more complexity, and the phrase following 'because' is an attempt to offer some sort of explanation for this claim. It is obvious to anyone that you have changed your mind on this, and you have never attempted to offer any justification for the 'because' phrase, but so long as you insist that you have not changed your mind, it is not unreasonable for me to point out that you are still wrong even after one more turn around the bowl. Furthermore, in attempting to present an example, you are having a problem with logical quantifiers. Putting aside the absurdity of claiming to believe that this sorry dialog is simpler and more straightforward than Eslaught' straight-to-the-point paragraph (the first one in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249285), one example cannot establish the general claim you originally stated, and your attempt to do so is simply an error in logic. I see that my goldfish analogy is not quite complete - your revolutions are getting faster and tighter. This is not so much the trajectory of a goldfish in a bowl as one being flushed down the toilet.

mannykannot 11y ago

So I have been advised by jj not to continue. Coincidentally, in what I think was an unrelated yet eerily similar experience, a squirrel hissed at me from its tree while I was running today. Once again, you attempt to rewrite the record, this time with a bland statement that you might now wish you had limited yourself to, but so long as you insist that you have not changed your mind on anything, then then I have the option to mention the various arguments you have offered for what was a much more emphatic position - to give just one example: "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. Neither is ideal." That is not just "more complex", and it is not just an opinion, it contains an argument (an apparently faulty one, but an argument nevertheless.) So long as you continue to deceptively misrepresent your former opinions and statements, there is no point in me posting an alternative here for it to be similarly misrepresented, but I will repeat my offer to do so if a third party gets involved. As most of your last post was devoted, once again, to claiming (without any attempt at justification) that I don't have a leg to stand on, it seems negligent of you to omit making an attempt at a refutation of even one of the many points I have raised in the course of this thread - anyone would think that it is yourself who you are actually describing. I am sure it is just an oversight, so here's one example for you to tackle, left unanswered from the very post you were replying to: what do you think is wrong with eslaught's explanation?

jjnoakes 11y ago
> what do you think is wrong with eslaught's explanation? Who said anything was wrong with it? All I ever said about it was this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393447 Which says nothing about it being wrong. In fact, to back up my opinion that his post is slightly more complex, and perhaps harder to understand, here's a thread where I in fact use an even simpler explanation than eslaught's, and the person I was explaining this to still didn't get it. Even they brought up C++ to try to clarify their position, and it turns out that by doing so they actually ended up proving themselves wrong. So in at least one concrete case, using C++ was actually better (more precise with fewer words and examples). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9248590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9248590 But I really did mean that I was entertained by watching you make stuff up and repeatedly fail at whatever your goal is, so by all means, don't stop now :)
- mannykannot 11y ago
  It is said that for a goldfish, each turn around its bowl is a new experience, because it remembers nothing of its previous circuits. You appear to be in the same situation, unaware that each claim you make is contradicted by something you wrote earlier. Take, for example, "all I ever said about it was this". What you actually did was first make the claim you are now repeating, and then, when I pointed out that doing so completely contradicted your original position, you changed your mind and decided that Eslaught's explanation was irrelevant (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9433742). Now that I have asked on what grounds you consider it to be irrelevant, you have circled back around to your original position, creating a lose-lose situation in which you have contradicted yourself regardless of what your actual opinion is. You have reached the point of creating epicycles of contradictions within contradictions, as all this is going on within your larger contradiction of first claiming inordinate complexity of any alternative to your approach and then trying to rewrite that as being merely a claim that there is necessarily some slight increment in complexity in avoiding C++. Let's look again at what you actually wrote: "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 That is not a claim of just slightly more complexity, and the phrase following 'because' is an attempt to offer some sort of explanation for this claim. It is obvious to anyone that you have changed your mind on this, and you have never attempted to offer any justification for the 'because' phrase, but so long as you insist that you have not changed your mind, it is not unreasonable for me to point out that you are still wrong even after one more turn around the bowl. Furthermore, in attempting to present an example, you are having a problem with logical quantifiers. Putting aside the absurdity of claiming to believe that this sorry dialog is simpler and more straightforward than Eslaught' straight-to-the-point paragraph (the first one in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9249285), one example cannot establish the general claim you originally stated, and your attempt to do so is simply an error in logic. I see that my goldfish analogy is not quite complete - your revolutions are getting faster and tighter. This is not so much the trajectory of a goldfish in a bowl as one being flushed down the toilet.