From: dblack@...
Date: 2006-12-20T13:33:41+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] where have all the experienced users gone?

Hi --

On Wed, 20 Dec 2006, Michael T. Richter wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-20-12 at 02:31 +0900, James Britt wrote:
>
>> Agreed.
>>
>> I've been marking all list mail as 'read' upon arrival so there is no
>> instant clue that there are new messages.  I visually scan for certain
>> sender names or topic words, and have some filters to catch references
>> to a small set of keywords.  Just in case.
>>
>> But I don't bother trying to keep up or pitch in as I once did.  I'm
>> sure I'm missing some interesting topics, but it's too tedious to wade
>> through "What is the best IDE?" , "What's wrong with my ajax?",  "Why is
>> my model not validating?", and "Your opinion on [foo] is teh sux."
>>
>> All in all, I'd rather just focus on writing, and writing about, Ruby.
>>
>> (This started way before the holidays, too, so we can't blame Santa's
>> elves.)
>
>
>
> While I can understand and appreciate the reasons for this approach,
> James, it does have a significant (and in my opinion bad) side-effect:
> you're leaving the field to those who can't contribute as much or as
> well as you can.  This means that a Ruby Newbie (hah! :D) coming into
> the mailing list for the first time does not see a vital community full
> of knowledgeable people ready to share what they know.  Instead they see
> an increasingly hostile community fraught with flames and lacking
> support for them.  A significant fraction of these (likely the majority)
> will then conclude that learning Ruby won't be worthwhile and will go
> elsewhere to less productive, less useful, less fun languages.  They
> suffer and so does the Ruby community as a result.

If it were all that deterministic and manipulable and predictable,
we'd just do whatever it was that pushed the "Make this a great forum
for all people, forever" button and that would be that.  It's
certainly too bad to see James pulling away from the list, but I think
we have to bend before we break, so to speak.  James is free to do as
he likes.

The increases in hostile, flame-like rhetoric on the list in recent
times will not, I'm afraid, vary inversely with signal.  However, I do
love the fact that there is still a lot of signal on this list.  It's
a bit more buried than it used to be, but on a decent day there are as
many interesting, well-intentioned, friendly posts as there were back
in the days that I'm supposed to be grumpily nostalgic about :-)


David

-- 
Q. What's a good holiday present for the serious Rails developer?
A. RUBY FOR RAILS by David A. Black (http://www.manning.com/black)
    aka The Ruby book for Rails developers!
Q. Where can I get Ruby/Rails on-site training, consulting, coaching?
A. Ruby Power and Light, LLC (http://www.rubypal.com)