No it's really not. "Damning with faint praise" is when, say, you've just effusively praised something else, and then say that the alternative is pretty good.
The "least-worst option" means it's not good, but all the alternatives are terrible. That's not damning.
> Damning with faint praise is an English idiom for words that effectively condemn by seeming to offer praise which is too moderate or marginal to be considered praise at all.
Which seems about right to me.
It's like writing an employee a letter of reference, and only saying that they're very punctual - meaning that there's nothing else good about them, other than the bare minimum of bothering to show up at work.
It seems to me that saying it's only good by comparison to how awful everything else is falls into this.
No. If someone asked you to recommend two employees, and you absolutely gushed about one, but then said the other is "always on time" and "reliable worker", etc. that would be damning with faint praise.
Saying that one employee is the least worst employee you have when someone calls you for a reference means they are the best employee. It also means you aren't particularly happy with any of them, but that's just adding a flavor to the sentiment that this employee is your best.
Now, if I asked you to recommend a bunch of project management/issue tracking software suites, and you absolutely floored me with praise for one, but said good but forgettable things about JIRA, that would be be damning with praise.
Coming full circle, saying that JIRA is the least-worst option means it's the best option and you just have an ideal in your head that isn't being met.
I just wanted to tell you that you hit the nail on the head for what I was conveying. I'm not an Atlassian employee, and I'm not out to evangelize Jira. I'm not happy with every decision they've made lately, and I have particular things I feel are mistakes where they delineate between core product/marketplace.
But when I look at the landscape of tools that I've used that compete with or compete with a part of Jira, I just prefer Jira over the rest of them by an not-unsubstantial margin.
That said, Trello was great for a small team bootstrapping a new product without a lot of external dependencies or parallel release cycles and I hope they let them run independently.
"Damning with faint praise" is a pretty subtle English idiom. In my experience, it's only used to refer to an instance where someone is socially obligated to offer praise, e.g. a doctoral adviser writing a reference for their student, who gives such faint praise that they intend the recipient to infer that, were they allowed to, they would have been explicitly critical. Since the comment author in question was under no such obligation, I don't think the idiom applies.
I think in this case it's meant to mean "project management and task tracking tools are basically always hateful, but I find this one the least hateful".
I once, over a beer, told the development team of a ticketing system that I'd never used anything I hated less than theirs, and they all grinned and said that that was high praise to them.
If you believe you can produce such a system that people actually like to use, rather than finding less hateful than the alternatives, I genuinely invite you to try, because I'd love to have such a thing available to me. But I'm afraid I'll remain skeptical until I see it :)
If anyone here has ever been confused by the expression "damning with faint praise", I hope this is an illustrative example.