From: Ben Tilly <ben_tilly@...>
Date: 2001-02-26T22:31:07+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11588] Re: Negative Reviews for Ruby and Programming Ruby

"Conrad Schneiker" <schneik@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
>Mitch Vincent wrote:
>
># If people would put half as much effort into something constructive
># as they do into advocacy of their favorite scripting language and
># Unix flavor the world would be a better place and this list's volume
># would be cut in half!!
>
>I beg to differ. (OK, I *insist* on differing. :-)

You don't just insist on it, you went ahead and
*DID* it! :-)

>Following your sorts of recommendations, many of us wouldn't know that
>Ruby existed, or would have only discovered it much later. Likewise
>for Perl before that. Likewise for many other valuable tools. Both
>the list volume and the number of contributors would both be cut by a
>lot more than half, for Ruby and for lots of other things. I think the
>world is much better off because of the consequences of advocacy for
>Ruby and for all other cool tools.  Advocacy is obviously not
>everyone's favorite activity, but I certainly want to encourage (and
>thank!) those who are so inclined.

There is good and bad advocacy.

Go to http://206.170.14.76/index.pl?node_id=26179 and
scroll down to my favorite links from other people.
You will find Programming Ruby listed.  I advocate Ruby
in other subtle and not so subtle ways.  But I have yet
to have people become offended.

Now on that site I have definitely seen _bad_ Ruby
advocacy.  People wandering by, making insulting
comments gets you nowhere.  Sometimes it leads to
people doing some research - for the purpose of
figuring out how they can return the favour by writing
a horrible review of Ruby somewhere!

So while I don't think that advocacy is alwasy wrong
or useless, I firmly believe that just going out and
preaching the cause is a Bad Idea.

Cheers,
Ben
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