Snark isn't the same as rationality.
Let's break it down, shall we? The comment contains the following three things:
And you think this is more rational than the detailed, respectful, intelligent comments made by people who actually thought about the questions for five minutes and shared their expertise?
I'm appalled.
Maybe it's obvious to you that having "most rational X" in the title is stupid. And to be honest in hindsight it seems a bit silly to me as well, now that I have explicitly thought about the reasons for it. But it wasn't obvious when I wrote it, and it surely isn't self-evident to everybody.
I'm not against setting up norms and rules, and yes they are gonna change on people, and yes people need to be humiliated from time to time for breaking them flagrantly, but it's simply unfair to make humiliating jokes in retaliation for breaking them when there is no actual reason for the person to have known about the norm's existence.
Note that Konkvistador didn't even have a link to a top level post to substantiate the claim that this norm exists, just "I think this has been mentioned before" -- am I supposed to read every comment on LessWrong to see what norms I'm supposed to be following?
Give me a break!
I share your surprise that the grandparent was so positively received. It was briefly at -1, since I was the first to encounter the comment and I thought it was inane, obnoxious and wrong, without being sufficiently wrong that it could get any points for clever irony or humor.
Mind you I upvoted Konk's actual comment.
Learning to program in a given language requires a non-trivial amount of time. This seems to be agreed upon as a good use of LessWrongers' time.
Each language may be more useful than others for particular purposes. However, like e.g. the choice of donation to a particular charity, we shouldn't expect the trade-offs of focusing on one versus another not to exist.
Suppose I know nothing about programming... And I want to make a choice about what language to pick up beyond merely what sounds cool at the time. In short I would want to spend my five minutes on the problem before jumping to a solution.
As an example of the dilemma, if I spend my time learning Scheme or Lisp, I will gain a particular kind of skill. It won't be a very directly marketable one, but it could (in theory) make me a better programmer. "Code as lists" is a powerful perspective -- and Eric S. Raymond recommends learning Lisp for this reason.
Forth (or any similar concatenative language) presents a different yet similarly powerful perspective, one which encourages extreme factorization and use of small well-considered definitions of words for frequently reused concepts.
Python encourages object oriented thinking and explicit declaration. Ruby is object oriented and complexity-hiding to the point of being almost magical.
C teaches functions and varying abstraction levels. Javascript is more about the high level abstractions.
If a newbie programmer focuses on any of these they will come out of it a different kind of programmer. If a competent programmer avoids one of these things they will avoid different kinds of costs as well as different kinds of benefits.
Is it better to focus on one path, avoiding contamination from others?
Is it better to explore several simultaneously, to make sure you don't miss the best parts?
Which one results in converting time to dollars the most quickly?
Which one most reliably converts you to a higher value programmer over a longer period of time?
What other caveats are there?