I think this is another case where the fact that you can't get a person's tone of voice via text causes people to take things the wrong way.
As another person said of themselves, I like the fact that people on HN point to other tools they use in a way that is related to the one being discussed in the comments. That makes HN a good place to find out about tools you hadn't heard of.
I didn't think the original comment was intended to be dismissive of zuo, but they were just pointing out their preference for a tool in that vein (which made sense to me since both are lisp-ish languages made for shell scripting).
I definitely see where you're coming from, but I think what gets me is that a lot of these comments don't actually know much about the specific tool being discussed; they just talk about a related tool instead.
If the parent commenter had said, e.g., "Zuo seems to have chosen to do X to address issue Foo, but this other tool took approach Y instead, and I like that better" — well that seems a lot more constructive, and on-topic. But just saying "I use <other tool>" is like... it doesn't belong. It's off-topic, in a way? Not strictly speaking, but enough so that it makes me a bit uncomfortable. It gives me vibes of, like... questioning the subject tool's "right to exist", so to speak, because "why would I use <tool the article is about> when I already know <other tool>!" without actually showing any effort to understand the differences.
I dunno if I'm explaining my thoughts here well. It's not a huge deal, and I definitely have also found some of these comments to be useful in the past, but their general tone rubs me the wrong way just slightly and I thought maybe it was worth commenting on.
As another person said of themselves, I like the fact that people on HN point to other tools they use in a way that is related to the one being discussed in the comments. That makes HN a good place to find out about tools you hadn't heard of.
I didn't think the original comment was intended to be dismissive of zuo, but they were just pointing out their preference for a tool in that vein (which made sense to me since both are lisp-ish languages made for shell scripting).