All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

They Call This a Softball Question in Interviews

chromatic on 2008-07-21T04:48:56

Recently there has been a feeling of growing discontent: how could Ruby — which felt so new and liberating two years ago — get saddled with so much negative baggage, so quickly?

— Pete Forde, We are RubyFringe

Take your pick of the aggressively dismissive attitude toward other approaches, vigorous and self-congratulatory messianic zeal, egocentric and deliberate misunderstanding of the rest of the world of software development, verbose and willful discussion of, despite baffling ignorance of, other programming languages, misunderstanding of MVC and the Active Record pattern, booing Dave Thomas at RailsConf 2007 for questioning why it was necessary to create a "Women of Rails" website featuring pictures of attendees, cheering at RailsConf 2007 when Chad Fowler said "People call us arrogant" when his point is that that's a bad thing, and the baffling fourteen year old boy sensibilities of the Rails Envy commercials, including my personal favorite, comparing the V in MVC to a drunken prom date.

I can understand arrogance from Olympians or research scientists who've just cured cancer. It seems out of place for people writing CRUD applications, even if they're all shiny with rounded corners and Ajax fade ins.

Ruby != Rails

djberg96 on 2008-07-21T14:45:40

Here's my list of reasons why:
  • Refusal by the ruby-core team to implement a real test suite.
  • Refusal by the ruby-core team to implement continuous integration.
  • Refusal by the ruby-core team to ever go back and refactor any of the core C files.
  • Continued use of pre-ANSI C. It's 2008.
  • Refusal by the ruby-core team to compile with any warnings on, ever.
  • Terrible release management by the core team. Community built spec suite failures ignored.
  • Addition of questional libraries into the stdlib.
  • Cowtowing to the Rails community.
  • Shoehorning 1.9 features into the 1.8 branch making the spec even more difficult to cover, and creating a serious crisis for alternative implementations.

Re:Ruby != Rails

chromatic on 2008-07-21T17:38:03

I agree with your entire post, including the subject. I don't believe that people outside the Ruby community who have a negative perception of Ruby hold those reasons though. For all of the technical problems of Ruby (and the only one on my list and not yours is questionable but fixable implementation decisions), perception is primarily a social problem.

(For similar Perl problems, see comp.lang.perl.misc and Perl golf.)

RubyFringe especially != Rails

lamech on 2008-07-21T19:11:27

I was at RubyFringe, and it felt a lot like YAPC; small, intimate, a chance to hang out and meet like-minded folks, and a chance to learn about a lot of very cool bleeding edge ruby stuff that *isn't* Rails, from the people who're actually making it happen. Pete was quite explicit about his mission being the improvement of the ruby community as a whole. While I agree that of course you reap what you sow, the emergence of a grassroots movement within the ruby community can only be a good thing. It sounds to me like you're taking Pete's rhetorical question -- meant to challenge his fellow rubyists to some (possibly long-overdue) soul-searching -- and using it to bash the guys who're trying to make positive change from within for the sins and omissions of the community they're trying to improve. Is that useful?

Re:RubyFringe especially != Rails

chromatic on 2008-07-22T00:08:14

It sounds to me like you're taking Pete's rhetorical question...

Are there any rhetorical questions on the Internet?

Maybe I'm really not someone who should talk about perceptions of technical communities. (I spend a lot of time on my employer's payroll watching and thinking about them.) Still, I find the Ruby world fascinating in a way that I don't find the Perl world, probably because I'm responsible for approximately none of the direction and development of the Ruby world. It's similar enough that I (believe I can) recognize patterns and behaviors, but different enough that I (believe I have) an interesting and useful perspective.

Is that useful?

That depends on the rhetoricalness of the question and whether my answer has any veracity. I can only answer the question for myself.

Rhetoric

ChrisDolan on 2008-07-22T05:11:35

Are there any rhetorical questions on the Internet?

Was it predictable that someone would feel compelled to answer this question with a question?