Original author here.

It's a real, real joy to read all these memories about the set, thank you all!

> Although I'm a huge fan of tech writing for beginners, in this case I could have done with 0.6 as much whimsy.

Can I meet you in the middle somewhere?

No, but seriously, there are what I consider very good reasons to adopt this tone. It's easier to write in a loose conversational style, first of all, and it's much more approachable for a wider variety of readers. But most importantly, to me anyway, is that I want to avoid even the semblance of an authoritative voice derived solely from the tone of the writing. Case in point:

> It's just a way of saying: "Outside the scope of this textbook".

That's exactly right. I'm not going to explain such a huge branch of mathematics with any justice in a short blog post, so I'm not even going to try. The cursory definition of "what you probably think it is" is more than adequate to get to the point, and I want to be clear about what I do and do not actually understand. To me though, "Outside the scope of this post" bespeaks of an author's deep and abiding understanding of the subject, as if he or she doesn't feel it necessary to deign to share that understanding just yet. For me, for this subject, This is not accurate, and I don't want readers to feel
like it is.

> only serves to tell the reader how little you know.

This is also exactly right. I don't know much about sets, at all. I could read about them! I'd love to read about them, and I probably will sometime. But I don't know much about them right now. I think it's _more_ important, not less, that I am clear about that. This post is written for someone who doesn't have a strong math background and is only just learning about the Mandelbrot set, in effect, me from a few months ago.

The authoritativeness of the post should come from the provable validity of the contents, not the airs of the author. I had this post vetted by JavaScript ~ninjas~ and a Math phd to avoid putting out bad information, that's much more important to me than proving that I know everything, because I don't.

That said, I want it to be an enjoyable read for anyone, so I'll keep the tonal crits in mind.

> A bit unrelated, but it's weird that Medium doesn't seem to support embedded code, and instead only seems to work with gists. It made the mobile experience pretty bad (all I get are links to the gists) and it would definitely "pollute" my gist history with a lot of little code snippets

I agree.

> Am I the only one that was a bit disappointed to find it's a beginner introduction to the Mandelbrot set? The title led me to believe there was some modification or something new =/

I'm sorry; but if I had truly discovered a new fractal set, I probably wouldn't
be publishing it on Medium first. :) Mandelwat was just too good a pun.

> Somebody introduce this guy to the Mandlebulb.

The Mandlebulb blows my mind.

> I understand this is meant as a joke, but I also think that's part of the reason why Node became so big.

I agree.

> I feel like you're going to get far better pictures and faster results from language closer to the metal like C/Rust/Java(???).

Yes, this is self evidently correct. Did you even open the post? One of the first hyperlinks goes to the widget that I finished the project with, which uses WebGL to render ~60fps interactive zooms up to the limits of 32 bit floats: http://mandelbrot.jfo.click

Thank you all for reading, it is really awesome to be able to share something I just learned and am excited about with so many people!!