16 days since last ruby drama
rubydramas.com
rubydramas.com
Having listened to Yahuda on various podcasts and whatnot, I get that he doesn't keep his mouth shut. Sometime's he's a douche, othertime's he's the smartest dude in the room and should be listened to. If you are a UGM and didn't expect this, maybe you should decline Yahuda's chance to speak.. his personality isn't exactly a secret, just saying.
tl;dr pricks will be pricks; experts ditto. Take the good with the bad, and research celebs.
Edit: although maybe he could have been more polite about it? But sitting through the misinformation seems like a waste of everybody's time.
If the presenter is wrong, a polite correction/adjustment can be fantastic.
If the presenter is just.. inefficient? Then maybe it can be turned into a learning experience involving but not embarrassing the presenter. Then the guy walks away thinking "wow, so-and-so taught me how to do this even better!"
There's... there's a ColdFusion scene? Do you guys have dance-offs with the ASP Classic guys or what?
>I can't get behind a change like this. This isn't even syntactic sugar. It's more like syntactic aspartame. It might slim down your code, but it's also a carcinogen.
There are still studies that find fault with aspartame, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20886530, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17805418 But hey, you can trust cancer.gov if you want. I don't touch the stuff, it tastes so disgusting anyway.
As an outsider to the ruby community (though a fan of the language), I'm not sure I have the right to an opinion on these dramas, but as a frequent unwitting observer of these events (since these dramas end up on sites I frequent and so on), I'd like to offer this thought:
The whole "coders-as-rockstars" meme, and the attendant treatment/fascination with these people -- I would be a slightly happier person if the world let that idea go. To me, it seems like this idea is where a lot of these dramas come from. People whose "celebrity" is overvalued, and people who pay way too much attention to these people. Coders are not rock stars. They're just not. They might be really good at what they do, they might even be 10x better than average, but its just not the same thing as being a "rockstar" and all the preening that comes with that, culturally or otherwise.
I can't think of anything less rockstarish than arguing with people over the internet or being a jerk at a usergroup.
The fact that these "dramas" are even news to anyone is just a side effect of the fact that people give certain drama queens way more attention than they deserve. I mean I'll admit it's entertaining -- but at the end of the day I feel like the fact that some guy was a jerk at a local conference, I mean, I just don't care. It's like intellectual junk food. I get a rise out of it, but it leaves me feeling like I haven't consumed something that makes me a better person.
Sometimes I think that Ruby's "drama" is equivalent to Rails' "magic", i.e. weak criticism perpetuated more by detractors and not really considered a problem internally.
They (can) demand high pay. They tour events and people come to see them. They get press coverage. People are excite to download their latest code. They do creative work and are opinionated about it.
That's not to say that all programmers should try to. E rock stars or that you should put that in a job listing, but there are people in the tech community that have a life more like that of a rock star than that of your average employed programmer.
(the "Last Drama" link, not the RSS links below)
Although it is amusing that the whole 'MINSWAN' has departed the community slightly, given that was a big motto for a lot of Rubyists a while back and part of the reason why learning Ruby was so fun, everyone helped everyone (mostly).
Yegge is fairly accurate with his conservative vs liberal rating in regard to each language community. Compare the type of mailing list posts in golang-nuts to nodejs; there's definitely more arguments in nodejs than in golang.
Python programmers appear to be more welcoming and don't seem to have the same need to wave enormous meta-programming wangs at each other. Not to say that metaprogramming isn't useful, but that it's just another tool in the toolbox. Take mailsnake for example: https://github.com/Leftium/mailsnake/blob/master/mailsnake/m... Completely classy :)
Being a jerk isn't always the wrong thing to do. But people who are not dhh propagate the tone without always propagating the situational awareness.
And really, that's one of the things that makes software development great.
How ironic is it for this person to call out Yehuda and say don't correct people, when that is exactly what she is doing, she is correcting Yehuda.
If she followed her own advice she would have wrote the blog post about a "un named" person and maybe waited a few weeks. Instead she is doing exactly what she is advocating against: Publicly telling some one they are wrong...
I was not the speaker whose demo he redid, but was there with the speaker and had a similar point in my metaprogramming talk.
Here is the code from my talk, and a new file named 'yehuda_inspiration.rb' that discusses Yehuda's change to the demo. https://gist.github.com/1893359
In short, the other presenter was not wrong... he had a piece of code that was stylistically different than what Yehuda would have written (see the 'include vs. extend' comments in that gist. Feel free to read that code example in that gist and make up your own mind.
I know first hand the other presenter did not take offense to this - although Yehuda claiming something is wrong when it is solely a style issue is a bit hubris.
Leaving advocatus diaboli role, the local user group is especially great place to learn about mistakes and better ways, as embarrassment that hits you is not that big (after all the local group is relatively small, it's rather not hundreds of people) and we all know that no one knows everything, we're all learning for the whole life. If someone is willing to explain me why what I'm doing is wrong or why his way is simply better than mine, I'm all ears. I don't have to agree immediately, we can talk, dwell a little about it, but in the end at least I gain other PoV, that may become even my own later.
Well, correcting someone during presentation may seem as not the best time for it, but actually in _local group_ it is the best time. Strike while the iron is hot, otherwise people may commit wrong things to their memory.
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The real problem is much bigger though. I noticed that lot of people cannot endure critique at all, even constructive one (and sometimes especially such one, if they somehow finally accomplished in their lives ways to ignore other types of critique). It's scary, because being criticized by your environment is a natural way of evolution and progress, as we all want to become better (or at least: most of us). Too gentle upbringing enforced in many countries (you cannot even smack your child for doing bad things, etc.) may be part of this spreading narrow and dangerous "delicate" mindset. It's even much worse that many communities (you can find them on internet a lot) disallow comments not resembling praises...
Really, do we have to be silent or say/write "awesome", "cool" or "great" in every second sentence, but we cannot say something is wrong, bad, lacking or incomplete as it may harm the presenter/doer/coder?
Where this world is going I don't even...