Speed concerns, rudeness, and narrow-minded excuses

I've been a little ashamed to be a part of the Ruby community reading
the narrow-minded denials and excuses people have been given when they
voiced their concerns about Ruby's speed. One of the things I've liked
the most about the ruby-talk mailing list over the 5 years I've been a
part of it has been the incredilble politeness and open-mindedness of
its participants, possibly following the great example set by people
such as matz, nobu, Dave Thomas, etc.

Reading respected people in the ruby community such as Austin Ziegler
mouthing off at people's valid speed concerns like he is all-knowing
and they are "full of it", that benchmanks are "crap" or "bullshit", 
that people who support them are "fools", (quotes from the recent
Python/Ruby benchmark threads) I thought, has the Ruby community
changed now that it's grown in size? You can get this sort of
narrow-minded flame-war mentality any day of the week on Slashdot, but
I can't remember reading this sort of stuff before on ruby-talk from
long term posters, and I'm surprised it hasn't been challenged more
than it has.

I was drawn to the Ruby-talk community half by the fantastic language
which is Ruby, which I found so intuitive and elegant (even if it
always had a few rough edges being actively worked on in terms of
library support, speed, etc.), but equally by the incredibly
open-minded and diverse group which make up the Ruby community, where
people have a wide variety of interesting views I can learn from, but
always tend to resolve their differences in a much more polite and
educated way than any of the other mailing lists I've been a part of.

I would be very disappointed if this politeness and open-mindedness,
which I think is one of the key appeals of the Ruby community, was
lost, due to the vocal efforts of a minority, who try to force their
opinions down everybody else's throats in a rude and closed minded
way. I don't really care whether the Alioth Shootout benchmarks are an
accurate representation of Ruby's performance, whether PostgreSQL is
divine and MySQL is demon spawn, whether FreeBSD or OSX are the only
decent operating systems, whether Emacs is better than Vi(m) ;)  What
I care about is whether somebody who has an opinion (which I may well
disagree with), has the right to politely express it, and receive
polite responses in return rather than abuse for holding an
ideologically incorrect opinion.

For this reason I am making a small protest, here at the end of my
email where nobody will probably read it:

"Austin Ziegler does not speak for me"

There, I've said it. And neither does anyone else, regardless of how
respected they may be in the Ruby community, if they dismiss someone's
valid concerns as stupid, or "crap", or "bullshit".

Hoping that the Python/Ruby benchmark threads are an aberration rather
than a shift,

Matt