What is the relevance of Dunning-Kruger? I've always taken the practical meaning of Dunning-Kruger to be that there's always room for self-doubt, though certainty may be increased the more external validation you get. The GP's comment does not seem any more certain than the average comment here.
While a valiant effort of you to meta-snark (couldn't help it, could you?), there's nothing much to "understand" about it. It's a well known experimental study. And it wasn't quoted here as a scientific citation -- just as a well known metaphor for "don't overestimate your smarts, kid".
>The fact that it was used in earnest without presenting any justification just makes it all the more hilarious, unintentionally so.
"Without presenting any justification"? What exactly do you thing this is? Some academic forum on psychology where we study cognitive issues?
He have, here, an exchange on programming languages, where the parent put down whole classes of programmers as inferior (to some unmentioned higher standard) with rigorous hand waving and a few invalid arguments -- several of which I refuted.
The reference to a cognitive superiority bias was given in this context, as a token "and who do you think you are" gesture. Nobody said that this was a clinically verified case of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action -- or that it was the core of the conversation anyway (it's a single link at the very bottom of a 450 word reply).
I know some people on HN tend to be pedantic, but you should not let pedantry ruin your ability to hold a conversation (AKA, the "well, actually" effect: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html ).
Either way, I didn't get that the OP wanted to put down other developers, rather that the language designers did, by "simplifying" their languages by sticking to tradition and leaving crucial features out, and needless features in.
In that it's not wise to put people using other languages (such as Java etc) as "lesser programmers", just because you think you're so much better for using something else.
People tend to overestimate their smarts -- and those kind of inane comments about whole language ecosystems are not exactly signs of brightness.
