From: James Britt Date: 2005-06-14T14:28:40+09:00 Subject: Re: Speed concerns, rudeness, and narrow-minded excuses Matt Pattison wrote: > 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. People are people, and even the best will, on occasion, express ideas or opinions of such a nature, or in such a way, as to surprise and disappoint. But, this still being a largely good-natured and tolerant group, such occurrences are understood for what they are: the exception, not the norm. > > 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 believe that is still true, but I'm biased. > > 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. This being a text-based medium, I don't really see much *forcing* going on. People are free to believe what they like, and configure their kill files as the need. > 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. Well, politeness is to be desired, but not everyone has the same notions of exactly what that is, and there may be times when politeness really isn't the best choice. I'd be more concerned if abject rudeness was the standard here, but, really, things are nowhere close to that. > > 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" I'm pretty sure Austin speaks only for Austin, and no one is presuming otherwise. I wouldn't worry about anyone thinking that any one person on this list is somehow representative of the whole. James Britt -- http://www.ruby-doc.org - The Ruby Documentation Site http://www.rubyxml.com - News, Articles, and Listings for Ruby & XML http://www.rubystuff.com - The Ruby Store for Ruby Stuff http://www.jamesbritt.com - Playing with Better Toys