I mean, you’re not wrong :P even if I’d probably put this as: Why not stay silent if you don’t have anything to add?
This particular topic, though, I do feel more strongly about than most I comment on here.
Technical exposition is an underappreciated art, and in many places an unrewarded one. How many star technical writers can you name, compared to star programmers? How much effort does writing a good review paper take, compared to an incremental research advance, and how much harder is it to publish one?
Halmos, one of the best expositors of (non-popular!) mathematics in at least a generation, quotes an anonymous mathematician in How to write mathematics: “All of us, I think, feel secretly that if we but bothered we could be really first-rate expositors”; the mathematician’s point being that nothing could be further from the truth. (Incidentally, it’s a bit startling how well Halmos’s principles map to the ones in Vonnegut’s How to write with style.)
I’m sensitive about this in part because I myself want to be good at exposition and never feel that I actually am. Still, personal hangups aside, if the guy is an expert and can communicate, with no tradeoff on either side, that’s rare enough—and must have needed work enough—that it should be celebrated.
