I would translate it exactly like that, though it's actually not ad hominem but ad humanitatem, really. We are all biased creatures, as others have pointed out. I think the critique is biased, I think it is biased because the author put a lot of effort in his (otherwise awesome) Java product, and therefore I quoted Upton Sinclair.
For instance, he argues that it would take a lot of working around to provide instant feedback for code with side-effects, but isn't that obvious? The LightTable video doesn't claim it magically mocks every external component or does some other fancy stuff. That doesn't make the feature less useful, especially in a language like Clojure, which was used for the demo. For me, that part reads much like "since it ws so hard to create Chronon, one cannot pretend the LightTable features are so easy to implement. Let me prove that by putting LightTable in the context of my product."
There was — deliberately, yes — a bit of snide and a lot of cynicism in my post, but I hope to have made it clear that it was not without a reason (for the cynicism, at least).
For instance, he argues that it would take a lot of working around to provide instant feedback for code with side-effects, but isn't that obvious? The LightTable video doesn't claim it magically mocks every external component or does some other fancy stuff. That doesn't make the feature less useful, especially in a language like Clojure, which was used for the demo. For me, that part reads much like "since it ws so hard to create Chronon, one cannot pretend the LightTable features are so easy to implement. Let me prove that by putting LightTable in the context of my product."
There was — deliberately, yes — a bit of snide and a lot of cynicism in my post, but I hope to have made it clear that it was not without a reason (for the cynicism, at least).