I’ve reread your comments, and they still read like an attack to me, while the top comment does not. You may feel like you’ve drawn a line, but the implications you made were quite clear. Calling it a dick move is a more direct attack, and talking about how it offends you tends to demonstrate that you have been and still are in fact attacking. Using strong language in a direct reply and talking about how wrong the mentality is is always going to be taken as an attack on the comment you’re replying to.

Personally I feel like the “one line” part of the article title is intentionally provocative, and as such, it invites critique, which is what the top comment is. It’s both impressive to fit a sudoku solver on one (short) line, and also at the same time, making a claim that can’t be fairly compared to other languages. As such, it is fair to point out that there’s a more universal way to evaluate the size of Arthur Whitney’s solution that is more compatible with other languages, and combined with the fact that everyone (including you?) already agrees that lines of code aren’t a good metric for anything, it’s not clear why you’ve taken such issue with that casual comment.

The article, disappointingly, doesn’t explain Whitney’s solution in words that non K readers can understand. At a glance, I would assume it’s a more or less brute force search over all possible sudoku boards and then matching against the cells, rows, and columns rules. In a way then, Whitney’s solver might be seen as a succinct statement of the rules of sudoku, which are indeed relatively short in any language.