On 9/14/2011 4:23 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
Oh, come on :) There's positive and negative traits to everything. Marketing
touts the positive and ignores the negatives. How is that not misleading?
Volkswagon was famous in the 1960's for advertising that its car was ugly and
small. Curtis Mathis advertised that its TV sets were the most expensive on the
market. It's all in how you think about it.
How many beer commercials show people getting into drunk driving accidents? How
many soda commercials show a 300 lb. hacker at his laptop with 15 empty soda
cans around him? Almost every miracle diet cure shows testimonials with the
disclaimer "results not typical". Marketing is misleading *on purpose*, it is
your job as the consumer to not believe anything at its word, and to try and
find the other side of the story.
There is simply no way to present all sides of any product, especially not in a
sound bite. Nor would anyone even want to read such or sit through it. And it
would *still* be open to charges of bias.
It would be misleading if Coke was advertised as healthy.
Most diet plans are presented in a misleading manner. But the most successful
one, P90X, is not misleading. It is pretty bald about saying you gotta work your
ass off to succeed at it.
As interpreted by Mr. Nowakowski, it's misleading to say that D is good because
some objective language popularity measurement shows D is gaining ground.
I think Tiobe is a reasonable indicator of "buzz" on a language. Whether buzz ==
popularity or not, it is certainly at least one definition of popularity.
