You both are exceptional characters, and positive ones I like to add. You both gave (and surely will give) much, much to the Perl community. And now we child (in the Perl sense) see you both argue this way - this is no good.

I'm not anglophone, as I said many times. And I understand that expressions in other languages cannot generally be translated - they could be ruder in English than in Italian. But what I cannot miss to observe is that BrowserUk never said that you're an academic that can only spit out hot air. BrowserUk was referring to the fact ("it") that the whole argument, without a solid backup as to where the optimisation could be shifted, reduced to something abstract and unfeasable in Perl^*.

To this extent, it seems perfectly in line with many other examples here in PM, where things are referred to as "crap", "nonsense" and similars (these are way ruder IMHO) by people that have too few time to be both effective and polite. Were it an ad-personam insult, I think it should have sounded like "I guess it's just your usual academic hot air" or something like this. Without "your usual", it seems not directed to you, but to what you said, thus perfectly in line with what one can expect to read here.

As a consequence, I also found reasonable that BrowserUk was sorry you felt insulted, but did not admit to have insulted you. I hope herveus will forgive me for citing something you replied in a further post, but I felt stunned by the fact that you didn't believe BrowserUk. This would sound as a big counter-slap to me - you're telling he's a liar.

I also think that something closer to an insult (whose weight I'm not able to measure in English) actually was in BrowserUk post - it was the word "shame". That would sound as a slap to me (something like: "you have to be ashame for this"), indeed, and I find it weird that you all (herveus included) were quite happy and forgiving about it. Listening parents argue teaches something, at least - something I won't ever find in books.

* Should I say perl here?