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Comment by decode | Hacker News Reader

I'm not in the Ruby community, but here's what I've gathered:

There was a talk at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference called "CouchDB + Ruby: Perform Like a Pr0n Star", which featured an extended porn-industry metaphor and what some have described as softcore porn in the slides. This talk created a lot of discussion in the Ruby community, in particular about the effect this kind of talk has on the female attendees, and the general atmosphere of the conference. It also caused the Ruby community to introspect on what kind of environment they are creating and how it affects people who are not heterosexual males who may wish to participate in that community.

See the links posted above by swombat for some of the discussion.

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Wow, and some people think the "social skills for nerds" links are off-topic for HN. Clearly many people in computing are ruled by their adolescent impulse to make people uncomfortable, at great cost to the community. Worse, they congratulate themselves for it. For the general good, here's the Cliff's notes for making people uncomfortable:

1. Gratuitous transgression is easy.

2. Necessary transgression is art -- intrinsically critical and enlightening. It's hard to pull off.

3. Compulsive transgression with no regard to the difference between #1 and #2 is juvenile.

Huh. Yeah, I could see how that might generate discussion.

As a heterosexual male, I would be uncomfortable being at a presentation that used pornographic imagery throughout. Call me a prude, but certain things simply don't belong in a professional environment.

Not only that, but when the issue was brought into the spotlight, the "leaders" of the Rails community dismissed as "edgy". Some have even applauded it. This is a major reason for Mike leaving.

When the issue was brought into the spotlight, the "leaders" of the Rails community dismissed as "edgy".

Porn is not edgy. Walking into Oracle's Head Office and shitting on their conference table is edgy.

http://twitter.com/raganwald/status/1641756320

So are there even less women in Rails than in other IT sectors? Or is it all just speculation? I could imagine applauding someone taking a stand against political correctness in certain circumstances.

Ditto. I used to be a member of a guitar forum where religion was banned from discussion. All well and good, but I left in the end because whilst it wasn't discussed, I couldn't stand to read endless lyrics about the wonder of god, and every other piece of advice being to "join in with your local church band". You can, apparently, smother a whole lot of guitar discussion with just a smattering of religion, and all without any actual discussion. In the end, I wasn't comfortable there due to something that was nothing at all to do with guitars.

I can ignore religion when I want to, and I can destroy an illogical belief system with the best of 'em, but, I'm much more likely to just find somewhere with less barriers to the subject at hand. It was unprofessional of them to disallow discussion of religion with wishy-washy rules, and it's unprofessional to plaster coding in porn, soft or otherwise.

Found it on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/mattetti/couchdb-perform-like-a-pr...

So it was one guys idea of a joke - big deal (and no actual nudity).

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