It's clear, but it's not immediately clear. You have to read a substantial amount of the article before it becomes clear, because the author starts with very little indication of it satirical. I found myself starting from the premise that it was in earnest and only realized it was satirical about 1/3 of the way through. Until that point I had a mental checklist of things I disagreed with, beginning with the phrase "expected amount of embedded abstractions".
Come to think of it, it's really an excellent example of effective satire, and these comments are an illustration of Poe's Law.
The article even claims, highlighted in the article, "It is obvious that so-called “functional” programming is flawed, it makes redundant things like refactoring and unit testing unnecessarily easy". If you are not capable of judging it as blatant sarcasm, I would in fact call you incompetent.
I doubt that is the problem. I think most people didn't read long enough for the sarcasm to be obvious and then wrote their comments as if they had read it all, despite probably not making it longer than the first paragraph. That might not be incompetent, but it is at least intellectually dishonest.
Or, more likely, it just surfaced that a lot of us skim articles. It is clear, but really only about halfway through the article itself (which isn’t a very good statement on the article getting its message across, to be honest)
> Either it's not clear, or you're implying that multiple commenters here are in some way incompetent.
Reading comprehension—especially deciding if something is satire or not—is a common problem on HN. I wouldn't classify that as incompetence, but it is an issue.
