5 ms·

Seems worth reminding ourselves of the old Ruby community motto: "Matz is nice, so we are nice."

btown 8y ago
It always seemed so incongruous to me that the Ruby language community could be so nice, while the Rails community (following the self-aggrandizing example of DHH) would be so aggressive to anyone with unorthodox thoughts.
- hnbroseph 8y ago
  > aggressive to anyone with unorthodox thoughts do you have some specific examples? (not a rails user, so if there are obvious things, i'm unware) a bit ot, but i've noticed an uptick in what seems like a reductive/straw-man characterization of disagreeing with particular ideas as summarily dismissing "different ideas" in general.
  - eridius 8y ago
    I don't have any examples, having not touched Rails in an extremely long time, but as I recall the core philosophy of Rails was "we're opinionated about things so you don't have to make decisions", and it's no surprise at all to me that a framework that prides itself on being opinionated would be hostile to differing ideas.
    - anko 8y ago
      I think this might be a mischaracterisation. Rails merged with Merb because they were accepting of new ideas, and didn't see the point of 2 groups wasting their time implementing the same kinds of stuff. Rails is an opinionated framework in that it has strong opinions for what the default configuration should be. They realise it can't be general purpose and stay as effective. But if you're doing CRUD apps, on the web, those defaults save you a bunch of time. That's not hostile to differing ideas, it's just saying that some ideas don't belong in rails or rails itself becomes less good.
- nixpulvis 8y ago
  I mean, it's Ruby on "Rails". The name kinda implies some stricter structure, which is exactly what you're complaining about I believe.
- pmarreck 8y ago
  I'm one of the weirdos who actually appreciated Zed Shaw's outrageousness back in the heyday of Rails, until everyone decided he was toxic and he jumped ship for... whatever the hell he is doing these days, Python maybe? He wrote the Mongrel webserver using the Ragel parser-generator which succeeded by sticking strictly to the HTTP spec unlike apparently everything else at the time. I also thought he was funny: > He sarcastically stated in November 2016 that "Python 3 is not Turing complete" due to claims from Python project developers that Python 2 code cannot be made to run in the Python 3 VM. Oh come on, that is hilarious. DHH is full of himself, but who wouldn't be, if they singlehandedly developed a world-changing webserver API?

It always seemed so incongruous to me that the Ruby language community could be so nice, while the Rails community (following the self-aggrandizing example of DHH) would be so aggressive to anyone with unorthodox thoughts.

hnbroseph 8y ago
> aggressive to anyone with unorthodox thoughts do you have some specific examples? (not a rails user, so if there are obvious things, i'm unware) a bit ot, but i've noticed an uptick in what seems like a reductive/straw-man characterization of disagreeing with particular ideas as summarily dismissing "different ideas" in general.
- eridius 8y ago
  I don't have any examples, having not touched Rails in an extremely long time, but as I recall the core philosophy of Rails was "we're opinionated about things so you don't have to make decisions", and it's no surprise at all to me that a framework that prides itself on being opinionated would be hostile to differing ideas.
  - anko 8y ago
    I think this might be a mischaracterisation. Rails merged with Merb because they were accepting of new ideas, and didn't see the point of 2 groups wasting their time implementing the same kinds of stuff. Rails is an opinionated framework in that it has strong opinions for what the default configuration should be. They realise it can't be general purpose and stay as effective. But if you're doing CRUD apps, on the web, those defaults save you a bunch of time. That's not hostile to differing ideas, it's just saying that some ideas don't belong in rails or rails itself becomes less good.
nixpulvis 8y ago
I mean, it's Ruby on "Rails". The name kinda implies some stricter structure, which is exactly what you're complaining about I believe.
pmarreck 8y ago
I'm one of the weirdos who actually appreciated Zed Shaw's outrageousness back in the heyday of Rails, until everyone decided he was toxic and he jumped ship for... whatever the hell he is doing these days, Python maybe? He wrote the Mongrel webserver using the Ragel parser-generator which succeeded by sticking strictly to the HTTP spec unlike apparently everything else at the time. I also thought he was funny: > He sarcastically stated in November 2016 that "Python 3 is not Turing complete" due to claims from Python project developers that Python 2 code cannot be made to run in the Python 3 VM. Oh come on, that is hilarious. DHH is full of himself, but who wouldn't be, if they singlehandedly developed a world-changing webserver API?