"The Ruby community has been criticized for being exclusive and harsh."
I haven't found that to be the case at all, unless you're asking questions that are easily solvable with a quick Google search (and that mostly stems from the flood of inane questions from Indian "programmer mill" graduates).
Node's community also benefits from the fact that a lot of people are still trying to wrap their heads around events and callbacks, so they naturally help each other through the process.
I was always baffled by this, but I from what I have read recently it seems to be a confusion between 'end-user' developers and 'ecosystem' developers.
End-user developers who only use ruby/rails/etc to build things, for work or whatever, operate on another plane from the developers of rails itself and various associated libraries.
Members of the first group generally do not need to come into contact with the machinations of the core ruby community for a long time, so we can be left a little baffled at first by these accusations of 'harshness,' all the other hackers who answer our questions on stackoverflow and write helpful instructional blog posts seem really nice!
Then eventually you read various IRC logs, mailing lists and personal blog posts by various members of project teams and certain notorious hero developers, and you realise where the accusations stem from. It doesn't seem as bad now as it was in the Rails 2 vs. Merb days however.
The most important thing for bystanders to realise however is that these criticisms of the ruby community do not actually have anything to do with the 'end-user' developers who you will be dealing with as peers on a day to day basis if you are writing a ruby project that isn't a library.
Anyway I've remembered that this thread is actually about node so I'll shut up and have breakfast.
See, that's just it. Rails is a different "community" than Ruby. And, as someone who has worked with both the better part of 5 years, I've found Ruby very open and welcoming while Rails less so.
I take more issue with Jolie's unsubstantiated remark about "the Ruby community". She casts a whole group of people in a disparaging light and doesn't been take the time to source it.
I'm baffled by the fact that an article about why Node.js is popular contains so many overtones of a Ruby/RoR takedown piece. I'm trying not to be defensive (Ruby/RoR are my language and platform of choice), but the constant us of Ruby and RoR in analogies where they play the bad guy kind of has me feeling a since of irony.
"The Ruby community has been criticized for being exclusive and harsh," says the person using the Ruby community as the fall guy to prop up the new, exciting kid on the block. Are the feelings of exclusivity in the Ruby/Rails community not in some way tied to the prevailing attitude toward other languages? cough PHP
Clarification: I don't mean the above to be a slight against PHP. I'm simply pointing out that a lot of the negativity in the Ruby community centers around snobbery toward other languages, and PHP often takes the hit... hence the irony here.
Ruby and Rails are inextricably linked, because that's how a lot of people get into Ruby, and Rails is by far the most "visible" Ruby project. Plus, Rubyists are the new Pythonistas are the new Perl(issimos?) are the new Lispers.
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"The Ruby community has been criticized for being exclusive and harsh."
I haven't found that to be the case at all, unless you're asking questions that are easily solvable with a quick Google search (and that mostly stems from the flood of inane questions from Indian "programmer mill" graduates).
Node's community also benefits from the fact that a lot of people are still trying to wrap their heads around events and callbacks, so they naturally help each other through the process.
>I haven't found that to be the case at all
I was always baffled by this, but I from what I have read recently it seems to be a confusion between 'end-user' developers and 'ecosystem' developers.
End-user developers who only use ruby/rails/etc to build things, for work or whatever, operate on another plane from the developers of rails itself and various associated libraries.
Members of the first group generally do not need to come into contact with the machinations of the core ruby community for a long time, so we can be left a little baffled at first by these accusations of 'harshness,' all the other hackers who answer our questions on stackoverflow and write helpful instructional blog posts seem really nice!
Then eventually you read various IRC logs, mailing lists and personal blog posts by various members of project teams and certain notorious hero developers, and you realise where the accusations stem from. It doesn't seem as bad now as it was in the Rails 2 vs. Merb days however.
The most important thing for bystanders to realise however is that these criticisms of the ruby community do not actually have anything to do with the 'end-user' developers who you will be dealing with as peers on a day to day basis if you are writing a ruby project that isn't a library.
Anyway I've remembered that this thread is actually about node so I'll shut up and have breakfast.
See, that's just it. Rails is a different "community" than Ruby. And, as someone who has worked with both the better part of 5 years, I've found Ruby very open and welcoming while Rails less so.
I take more issue with Jolie's unsubstantiated remark about "the Ruby community". She casts a whole group of people in a disparaging light and doesn't been take the time to source it.
I'm baffled by the fact that an article about why Node.js is popular contains so many overtones of a Ruby/RoR takedown piece. I'm trying not to be defensive (Ruby/RoR are my language and platform of choice), but the constant us of Ruby and RoR in analogies where they play the bad guy kind of has me feeling a since of irony.
"The Ruby community has been criticized for being exclusive and harsh," says the person using the Ruby community as the fall guy to prop up the new, exciting kid on the block. Are the feelings of exclusivity in the Ruby/Rails community not in some way tied to the prevailing attitude toward other languages? cough PHP
Clarification: I don't mean the above to be a slight against PHP. I'm simply pointing out that a lot of the negativity in the Ruby community centers around snobbery toward other languages, and PHP often takes the hit... hence the irony here.
Ruby and Rails are inextricably linked, because that's how a lot of people get into Ruby, and Rails is by far the most "visible" Ruby project. Plus, Rubyists are the new Pythonistas are the new Perl(issimos?) are the new Lispers.