From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-04-05T23:16:07+09:00 Subject: Re: fed up with this newsgroup On Apr 5, 2005 10:04 AM, James Britt wrote: > B. K. Oxley (binkley) wrote: >> I'm new to ruby-talk. Why the pile-on for this fellow? I looked >> through some of the material linked, and his most recent posts >> since I joined, and he seems "mostly harmless" (in the words of >> Douglas Adams). > Exactly true. Nothing a decent bozofilter can't handle better than > a thousand snarky comments (ironically decrying the state of the > newsgroup). True enough. I generally hit 'y' when I get one of Ilias's threads, although I do look at the participation of some of the smart people who respond, because it's interesting. They have more patience than I. >> I thought Ruby was the language for nice people. Why all the >> snippy remarks? > Good question. Please don't take this rash of churlishness as the > norm for ruby-talk. There may be subsets of the Ruby community for > whom insults and flamefests are acceptable, but I believe they are > in the minority. To try to explain why the remarks are so snippy: Ilias is an annoying twit. While he is finally *really* starting to try to understand Ruby, he's still not doing the single thing that will help him understand Ruby most: writing a substantive program. Ilias's writing is haughty, arrogant, and excessively verbose. (Quoting Inigo Montoya from _The Princess Bride_: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.") His formatting in his posts is difficult to read, and his misuse of the English language (which may be a non-native speaker issue). He has apparently decided that he's going to do this his way -- and everyone else in the world has to revolve around him; any attempt to try to get him to look at the real issues, in my experience, leads him to state that the discussion is "off-topic." Ilias may not be a troll, but he has certainly acted like one; if he's not a troll, his style and people-skills certainly need work, as he *is* wearing on the patience of some people. For all that, though, he is asking interesting questions from which people can learn -- if he'd only bother to listen to the answers provided. This is more than can be said for some past denizens of ruby-talk. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca