Comment by gleb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gleb | Hacker News Reader

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PR, marketing and politics are facts of life. The reasons that Ruby/Rails community ridiculed (obviously accurate) "ruby is slow" are exact same reasons the community was such a success in the first place. Consider what would have happened if "ruby is slow" meme took off. Forget the RoR itself, but it would have actually been a disservice to users who don't understand the details and wouldn't have been able to make the right choices.

If you actually want to affect a change with communication it's useful to think through what, where and how you say it. But mostly, don't just complain, include a patch. E.g. our Ruby and RoR patches were accepted the same day with gratitude: http://blog.pluron.com/2008/01/ruby-on-rails-i.html

We (Pluron/Acunote team) are going to be presenting @ RailsConf 2009 ( http://en.oreilly.com/rails2009/public/schedule/detail/8615 - Advanced Performance Optimization of Rails Applications ) and it's going to take some work to frame the presentation in a useful fashion. As tempting as it is just to point out how bad every single part of the stack is, from our hosting to Firefox, it would be highly misleading; they are still the best available options.

Having said that, it's a pleasure to have HN where these sensitive topics can be discussed in a rational fashion.

I do not believe that forthright explanations of genuinely complex topics can ever be a disservice to users -- accurate and complete information is critical to "make[ing] the right choices".

The suggestion to provide patches is a simple displacement mechanism. A correct, reasoned evaluation is not predicated on also including patches, and a reasoned evaluator may have significant cause to not invest further effort in providing improvements to the evaluated software.

I agree with you, but I think the gp has a point: look at Java as an example. Here we are, at a point where Java code runs extremely fast, but because of the "Java is slow" meme that took off at the turn of the century, any time Java comes up you _still_ see uninformed people on (for instance) Slashdot insisting that Java is unusable for important code because it's so slow.

That said, I don't think the right solution to avoiding problems like this is a "head in the sand" approach. If there are real performance issues, they should be acknowledged and addressed. I definitely get the sense that a lot of Ruby zealots are trying to pretend that there is no problem, which is something that Java zealots tried to do years ago (and something that the people in control of feature requests still do quite a bit, using the "Nobody can microbenchmark the JVM, it's too smart!" excuse).

I don't know why this stuff gets people so emotional, though. You don't see carpenters have heated arguments about whether a screwdriver is better than a hammer; why do programmers get so emotionally attached to their tools, refusing to acknowledge the limitations and strengths of each particular one?

I can think of two reasons getting emotionally attached to the tools: learning the tool, be it Java or Ruby, requires considerably more thought than learning to use a screwdriver and using the tool shapes the way problems and solutions look to a programmer.

Required effort causes programmers to know less languages and to value the languages they already know higher as they've had to come up with a rationalization for learning the language. This rationalization hinders acknowledging the downsides of the languages they've learned.

Additionally, languages give us our vocabulary and solutions seen beautiful by a programmer of one language can seem incomprehensible or at least ugly to programmer of another language. This is at least something that I've personally observed in a Java-shop I work in.

People still get emotional over primitive tools. Having an emotional stake in the tool must have conveyed some evolutionary advantage as we all display it.

Obviously, some language/OS/etc cultures are more fanboyish than others. I tend to not get active in those; it'd be embarrassing.

Edit: I am specifically thinking about Ruby here. It seems quite neat and worth trying, but... Maybe I'm spoiled with polite communities.

The reasons that Ruby/Rails community ridiculed (obviously accurate) "ruby is slow" are exact same reasons the community was such a success in the first place. Consider what would have happened if "ruby is slow" meme took off.

Sadly, there's no standard and acknowlegedly forceful way to say: "Your statement is technically veridical but I disagree with the connotations you intend to sneak in."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4h/when_truth_isnt_enough/

Nice exposition of the idea, thanks. In the vernacular, isn't it just "attitude" and "tone"? It's also possible to not intend the connotations, at least not consciously.

My language is powerful; yours has dynamic binding; his is slow.

Sadly, there's no standard and acknowlegedly forceful way to say: "Your statement is technically veridical but I disagree with the connotations you intend to sneak in."

Yeah, there is. You yell. That's why cable TV news shows (and politics in general) suck so much -- you get two sides who refuse to actually contradict each other competing on volume to have their message triumph over the other.

That's because most of the people watching are going to come away with one idea, and you want those people. If you want to "win" in the minds of those simple-minded people, and your opponent isn't saying something that can be easily falsified, you have to compete on volume, arrogance, and ferocity.

On the other hand, if you only care about the viewers or readers who are capable of having a nuanced view, you can simply say what you have to say, as clearly and cogently as you know how. They'll understand and remember. But will you really be satisfied with those people? Probably not, if you're fighting for votes or market share. In other words, unless all you want is a fair shake from intelligent people, what you want can't be had in a civil way.

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