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Comment by cutler | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget Ruby. Only Ruby (and Clojure) can liberate the mind enough to facilitate such flights of fancy :)

It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots.

You don’t hear the same about Nim, for example(yet?), In my experience.

I don’t deny Ruby’s impact on the industry I just have a hard time with the attitudes prevalent in the devs I’ve worked with... it is strikingly stereotypical.

Complains about the "pretentiousness" of Ruby developers (Out all the languages!). Proceeds to mention Nim. Rub his mustache, drink his kombucha a put another vinyl.

I don’t see your point. A large base of Nim users are looking for a pragmatic alternative to the C/C++ family without the aggressive anti-modernism of Go. Nim is certainly not the only player in this realm, but far as I know there isn’t a “Nim Drama” Twitter or tumblr. The drama queen stereotype of Ruby and Rails is very well earned on a repeated basis. All the communities have had their dramas but Ruby and Rust to a lesser extent seem to attract it a lot more as a pattern.

> A large base of Nim users are looking for a pragmatic alternative to the C/C++ family without the aggressive anti-modernism of Go.

You guys make this too easy. Unless it was sarcasm, so whoosh me, and chapeau!

Well, you sure make a good case for Rubyists being incredibly pretentious.

Hardly anyone uses Nim. It's extremely niche, even compared to something like Rust. That's why there's no Nim infighting.

Before you can have dozens of people fighting about a thing, you need more than a dozen people to care about that thing.

Oh believe me. There definitely is infighting. The people doing the infighting just haven’t started trying to involve the wider audience (yet?) :)

This is a real shame, I think, because the same things that made Ruby and its community such a revelation in the early years of this century (as a sort of revolt against enterprise development and especially the Java ecosystem), make me quite like Nim in a world with the complexity of C++ and the restraints of Rust. To be clear I happen to like all these languages but I also value their many contrasting personalities.

> It really is a pretentiousness held in a group of language zealots.

Can’t tell if this is ironic or not, but Rubyists are pretty well known as the friendliest out of all language communities, and have been for over a decade now

From my experience both inside the Ruby community and out, it is pretty much exclusively Rubyists saying that about themselves. Almost every community I've seen considers itself inclusive and friendly.

No, I’m not being ironic. And as an entire, stereotyped group Rubyists sure are nice.

Pretentious doesn’t mean rude or unwelcoming and I don’t want to insinuate that.

We had the rock star solo developer phase.

Thankfully we grew out of it.

I don't think it was growing out of it so much as a lot of them went and chased the new shiny over at NodeJS.

That does explain so much about the node community.

Not all of them were rock stars. Some we ninjas.

We are always on the receiving end of some claims. The feeling of easy accomplishment and unhindered flow is not something you get from every language out there, and not all languages explicitly advertise themselves as "maximizing developer happiness". I've never focused on lisp or emacs, but I am neutral towards their claims that god wrote the universe in lisp. Same with a perl user's claims of succinctness. I don't judge or envy them. Won't know until I learn the language and its tooling. And you won't really know until you try chaining a few map/reduce/select operations and have them compute lazily in ruby.

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