It's been explained well. If you want to point out a fact that paints someone in a bad light, but you are concerned about the fact rather than making people feel bad, you say "I don't want to judge, but [what I say here implies a judgement.]"
For example: "I don't want to judge, but I bought a gallon of milk three days ago and didn't get to use a drop of it." My concern isn't that you feel bad about drinking the milk or to paint you as a milk thief to others, my concern is that I bought milk and I didn't get to drink it. I'm being forced to offer a judgement in order to talk about my own experience.
>If you want to point out a fact that paints someone in a bad light, but you are concerned about the fact rather than making people feel bad
What you do is that you just don't say it... that's what you do if you're actually concerned about painting someone in a bad light / don't know if the fact applies at all.
No. Reality is that people will disagree with other people. And pretending that an opinion has no value because it might upset someone or apply to a generalization or group that isn't intended to mean "all of Group X" so much as "many/most of Group X, from my experience" as a disclosure doesn't mean that the rest of the statement, that could be impersonal or even offensive to some has no value.
If the only person being discussed is the author of the library, and you don’t know them…. what relevance is someone’s experience with other people who share a trait?
The idea of “pretending” here is interesting, I find the whole “ I don't want to judge him” to be its own form of dishonesty….
I am happy to see that the guy has rejected the idea of renaming the project. I am judging him: he is just as arrogant as any other Googlers. I'm sorry I didn't wanted to judge him, or that I even implied it. He deserved all the judgement. Long live the new definition of Vanilla JavaScript!
There are things that can't be written down without hidden (or obvious) judgement. This is one of those.