with Mongrel, or yourself with Swiftiply and EventMachine, or
MentalGuy with FastThread, or Wycats with DataObjects, or Evan with
Rubinius exactly grow on trees. The people that are making these types
of contributions, and more importantly delivering working, stable
code, are relatively rare. When we lose one it’s a shame.
Gotcha. I took it as a technical comment, not a social one. I agree
about the social comment. I think a big reason for that, and that I
think
is one of the points of Zed’s rant, is that things like that take a hell
of a lot of time, and can still be very hard to convert into something
that actually pays the mortgage & feeds the kids.
I don’t think the Ruby world is different than others in that respect,
but
I do think that the practical demand to do something with one’s time
that
earns one a living, as you well know, applies a lot of backpressure on
the
drive to innovate and to try new things.
On Jan 2, 2008 8:10 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected]
wrote:
Martin DeMello wrote:
On Jan 1, 2008 11:59 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Rebol is slow. It was pretty much the slowest thing in the Alioth
shootout the last time I ran the analysis.
This from a rubyist?
I guess you haven’t seen my RubyConf 2007 paper. Rebol is slower than
Ruby … a lot slower.
I know I meant that Ruby is the other language about which we say
“look everyone! cool language! programmer productivity! fun!” and they
turn up their noses and say “omg slow”.
matrices and “programs”. IIRC it is recursive as well; it definitely has
a functionality equivalent to “lambda”. But HP has always considered it
a dialect of Lisp, not a dialect of Forth.
Interesting! Rebol is in many ways a Forth/Lisp cross too, and of
course there’s Joy, but that never seemed like a ‘real world’ language
somehow.
It’s not like people who are willing to write these sort of things,
like Zed is/was with Mongrel, or yourself with Swiftiply and EventMachine,
or MentalGuy with FastThread, or Wycats with DataObjects, or Evan with
Rubinius exactly grow on trees. The people that are making these types
of contributions, and more importantly delivering working, stable
code, are relatively rare. When we lose one it’s a shame.
What makes it more saddening is that each person’s contribution to
the community is multiplicative rather than linear: we all learn from
one
another. I know I benefit a lot from the time I spend here.
Just for one small example, Zed was the guy who introduced me to
Ragel and sold me on the idea of copying the specification BNF directly
into
a state machine generator for the sake of robustness, maintainability,
speed, and standards-compliance. Those are lessons I’ve taken over to
other projects since, including lib2geom’s svgd parser and (indirectly
via 2geom) Inkscape.
Still, leaving might have been the best thing for Zed; it’s obvious
he was in a situation that wasn’t very healthy for him, or arguably
those
around him either. Like Giles, I hope that any needed changes can get
made.
Here’s looking forward to another year of Ruby. I owe all of you more
than you know.
On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 01:18:46AM +0900, James B. wrote:
some basic maturity.
That doesn’t mean people can’t or shouldn’t point out weak arguments,
unsound ideas, bad code, etc, just that being nasty is self-serving and
bad for the Ruby community.
I’ve seen people, from time to time, chime into a slightly heated debate
with the words “What would Matz do?” or something to that effect. It
tends to work well. All it takes is a reminder to try to adhere to the
reputation that Ruby’s community is one of the friendliest – and to
offer those reminders even when someone is defending Ruby against
aggressors.
That doesn’t mean people can’t or shouldn’t point out weak arguments,
unsound ideas, bad code, etc, just that being nasty is self-serving and
bad for the Ruby community.
I’ve seen people, from time to time, chime into a slightly heated debate
with the words “What would Matz do?” or something to that effect. It
tends to work well. All it takes is a reminder to try to adhere to the
reputation that Ruby’s community is one of the friendliest – and to
offer those reminders even when someone is defending Ruby against
aggressors.
I think that’s why Rails has issues. “What would DHH do?” Well, he’d
probably flip you the bird or something. Very very good leadership in
terms of generating buy-in can be very very bad leadership in terms of
setting the tone.
On Wed, 2 Jan 2008 17:56:34 -0500, Rick DeNatale wrote:
Interestingly enough, although the rant in question seems to be more
about the Rails community than the Ruby community, all of the
discussion of this seems to be Ruby-talk.
My entirely unscientific theory: Because in Ruby-talk, we care about
how, and whether, we get along.
I’ve seen people, from time to time, chime into a slightly heated debate
with the words “What would Matz do?” or something to that effect. It
tends to work well. All it takes is a reminder to try to adhere to the
reputation that Ruby’s community is one of the friendliest – and to
offer those reminders even when someone is defending Ruby against
aggressors.
MINSWAN
Jeremy McAnally recently brought that up on the rails-talk list when
someone complained about yet another repeat of the recent newbie
question about why the tutorial in AWDWR doesn’t work with Rails
1.2.x. Few understood it.
Interestingly enough, although the rant in question seems to be more
about the Rails community than the Ruby community, all of the
discussion of this seems to be Ruby-talk. I’m not sure I’ve even seen
it mentioned on Rails-talk. I guess those of us who are rubyists at
heart first, and perhaps rail-roaders second, have thinner skins.
On Wed, 2 Jan 2008 17:58:51 -0500, Giles B. wrote:
I think that’s why Rails has issues. “What would DHH do?” Well, he’d
probably flip you the bird or something. Very very good leadership in
terms of generating buy-in can be very very bad leadership in terms of
setting the tone.
Exactly.
Great as it may be, I think the word “opinionated” has a tendency to
lead
people down two different, equally incorrect garden paths:
“opinionated”, “agile”, “YAGNI”, “ignoring the wheel”, “insufficient”
Interestingly enough, although the rant in question seems to be more
about the Rails community than the Ruby community, all of the
discussion of this seems to be Ruby-talk. I’m not sure I’ve even seen
it mentioned on Rails-talk. I guess those of us who are rubyists at
heart first, and perhaps rail-roaders second, have thinner skins.
I think that’s why Rails has issues. “What would DHH do?” Well, he’d
probably flip you the bird or something. Very very good leadership in
terms of generating buy-in can be very very bad leadership in terms of
setting the tone.
“opinionated”, “agile”, “YAGNI”, “ignoring the wheel”, “insufficient”
and
“opinionated”, “obnoxious”, “rude”
Yah. The other thing is, DHH has all these dismissive opinions about
“enterprise”, but he actually went and read Fowler’s “Patterns of
Enterprise Architecture.” A lot of the Rails ex-PHP types parrot the
attitude without emulating the research (or even realizing it ever
happened).
My own introduction to the sociology of Ruby was an episode where some
Perhaps we could have
community and want to co-sustain.
Eh, I think that’s a bit extreme. Show me another programming language
community where you can have long meaningful discussions about the
semantics of language constructs and ideas for improvement and so on,
and also ask how to split a string every n characters, and get the
same kind friendly, helpful replies in either case. Even when folks
bump heads, it’s usually done in a respectful way. The social dynamic
of the ruby community makes you want to plant trees and recycle and
group hug. And that counter-acts global warming.
I think that’s why Rails has issues. “What would DHH do?” Well, he’d
probably flip you the bird or something.
Giles B.
I just had to laugh at this.
It’s just so true. So I complain about the lack of an IdentityMap in
ActiveRecord. A few AR fans tell me it’s too hard. DHH says “go get
'em tiger” (which I take as pretty patronizing), and later (IIRC)
something to the effect of, STFU until I’ve contributed something
worthwhile to the community.
Now by that point I’m not going to claim some sort of notoriety, but I
did have 4 active projects on Rubyforge including an ActiveRecord
adapter for MSSQL.
So I’ve been wrong many a time here on comp.lang.ruby. But I feel like
I’ve always been given the benefit of doubt, and the basic respect I’d
hope to myself be giving to other Rubyists here. They just don’t feel
like the same community.
Anyways, back to Zed: Despite some people claiming “it’s not that
hard”, people willing to write robust, stable, C extensions for Ruby
are very few and far between it seems. Pure Rubyists are a dime a
dozen in comparison. At least that’s my perception of things.
Depends on what one is developing.
Some things are (a) still hard in pure Ruby and (b) much more useful
without depending on a C extension.
On Wed, 2 Jan 2008 17:56:34 -0500, Rick DeNatale wrote:
Interestingly enough, although the rant in question seems to be more
about the Rails community than the Ruby community, all of the
discussion of this seems to be Ruby-talk.
My entirely unscientific theory: Because in Ruby-talk, we care
about
how, and whether, we get along.
Agreed. That’s (partly) why I started this whole sorry thread. (I
apologize.)
I’m a rubyist first and a rails adherent a distant fifth. I hate to be
tarnished by such a broad brush, but Zed’s rant hit the entire
community. I had to shine a light on it. Though it would have happened
anyway, I regret being the person to first post on it here. Sorry,
sorry, sorry.
I know I meant that Ruby is the other language about which we say
“look everyone! cool language! programmer productivity! fun!” and they
turn up their noses and say “omg slow”.
Well … Ruby is not “omg slow”, just “sorta slow”, as long as we’re
being precise. Rebol is “omg slow”.
Interesting! Rebol is in many ways a Forth/Lisp cross too, and of
course there’s Joy, but that never seemed like a ‘real world’ language
somehow.
Yeah, Joy and Factor probably have a lot in common, although I don’t
recall how much of Joy is from Forth and how much from Lisp. Still, I’m
reminded of the old saw, “If you’ve seen one Forth, well, you’ve seen
one Forth.”
Not that I blame Chuck, but I find it unfortunate that this thread is
getting about 50 or more posts then the usual code related thread.
Perhaps its just me.
I meant that Ruby is the other language about which we say