From: James Britt <james.britt@...>
Date: 2006-12-20T14:51:58+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] where have all the experienced users gone?

Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-20-12 at 02:31 +0900, James Britt wrote:
 >> ...
>> 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.
> 

Well, I've not abandoned the list (as my posts on this thread shows), 
but I have realized that I cannot stay on top of it as I once could. 
More to the point, though, the gradual shift in content and tone has 
made me less inclined to want to stay on top of the list as a I once 
did.  (And not just this lists; most lists now get the "mark-as-read on 
arrival" treatment.)


> As I said I understand fully your reasons for stepping out like this.
> I'm just wondering if you've thought through the possible consequences.
> 

No, of course not.  I'm making decisions based on what I think is best 
for me.  There's no ill will involved.  I'm not stooping to calling 
newbies "vampires" or other such nonsense.  I just don't have the 
wherewithal or the inclination to follow each thread on the list.

I'm not enthralled by Rails; I don't care about IDE choice.  I do watch 
for posts from certain people or on certain topics, and I'm too much of 
a bigmouth to stay quiet very long.   But mostly I'm trying to earn a 
living hacking Ruby, and time is short.  (Side note: I've given up on 
reading most top-posted comments.  If someone wants a response, they 
should make it easy to read their post.  If they don't care about my 
time, I don't care about their problem.)

As for stepping out, I'm still looking after ruby-doc.org, and getting a 
Ruby book on-line:

   http://www.beginningruby.com

And I organize the Ruby group here in Phoenix.

Mailing lists and developer communities change.  That's life.  It would 
be quite sad if this list didn't see a constant shift in those offering 
guiding hands to newcomers.

Maybe a better question to ask is, Who are the *new* experienced users 
on the list?

And if we can't find them, then there's a real problem.


-- 
James Britt

"To predict the behavior of ordinary people in advance, you only have to
assume that they will always try to escape a disagreeable situation with
the smallest possible expenditure of intelligence."
    - Friedrich Nietzsche