Re: MIDASWAD - Matz is Dumb and so We are Dumb

A quick, lazy response, because I shouldn't feed trolls anyway, and I simply 
do not have the time tonight.

Anyone who believes Ilias should be given the benefit of the doubt, and that 
the "list police" (just concerned users, really) shouldn't be warning people 
not to feed the troll, watch what Ilias does here. I'll bet money that if he 
responds to this post at all, he'll be sure to point out how little of it he's 
read, and how little he respects me. Judge for yourself if that's a fair 
reaction to what I'm actually writing here, with no particular bias towards 
Ilias, though I should be biased by now.



On Monday, June 20, 2011 02:26:03 PM Ilias Lazaridis wrote:
> If "Matz" would act like a Moron (in context of language-design),
> would this mean that the "We's" would act like moron's, too?

Probably not.

> you cannot design a consistent OO language if you apply "Design by
> Egoism". If you ignore logic and reason, just because it happens that
> you have some warm feelings for a construct (or person), and cold
> feelings for another one, then you apply "Design by Egoism". And this
> will slowly degrade the language.

This from the person who now ignores everything I say, no matter how on-topic 
and relevant, as "biased babbling" -- yet somehow has the time to _post_ a 
reply pointing it out as "biased babbling" and informing the community that he 
didn't read it.

> It's his language, one will say, he has the right to do so. Well, it's
> possibly his language, but there is something more:
> 
> Honour!

Actually, there's something even more than that: Fork it. IIRC, Ruby is mostly 
under the BSD license. If you really think Matz is doing a bad job, and you 
can't convince him otherwise, you are welcome to fork the language or the 
interpreter. This has been done before, with some success -- maybe in the long 
run, Matz will prefer your fork. See: YARV.

> What is clear is, that this framework *requires* much from ruby - and
> the Main Ruby Implementation (MRI, Matsumutos Ruby Implementation)
> starts buckling.
> 
> Several new interpreters "pop out of nowhere". There's a "professional
> edition" of ruby, other companies implement specialized versions with
> new garbage-collectors, and who knows how many "hidden" ones.

Actually, one of these interpreters "popping out of nowhere" was YARV, which 
has become Ruby 1.9. It's also given us the beginnings of an actual language 
standard, which would imply that, like other established languages, Ruby could 
have any number of compliant implementations, and your code would be portable 
between them.

Regardless, I don't know of anyone claiming YARV is "buckling".

> Others
> make the "scalability dictated" move to the beloved Java Language. And
> others take the "in between solution":
> 
> Ruby On Java On Rails.
> 
> What a contradiction! Shouting on Java, and then using Java as the
> foundation to execute the "better" language, JRuby, and the "better"
> web-framework. Anyway.

As if Ruby people like C any better? Using the JVM (not as much actual Java 
itself these days) as a lower-level basis for implementing Ruby, and providing 
a convenient API for scripting Java from Ruby, is really no different than 
using C to implement Ruby.

It's Java's semantics we don't like, not its performance characteristics.

> Oracle & IBM & Others - large scale companies, which manage to
> cooperate (because they realize they *have* to join efforts). Not that
> the eclipse-project is a masterpiece of liberality, but at least there
> are processes.
> 
> The companies surrounding ruby *fail* to do so. They do not cooperate
> efficiently,

So they do cooperate, just not "efficiently"? Is that what you're saying?

> In the Ruby and the Rails domain, you see "big" names in the sponsor
> list of conferences and events. But you don't see those companies
> *collaborate* efficiently where it is most important: on the language
> level.

Yet your example of Oracle, IBM, and others, is an example of collaborating on 
the IDE and framework level, not the language level.

> Politics everywhere, throughout the language system, an even the
> "Rebels" (see e.g. "Rails is a Ghetto")

Say what you will about Zed, but he has actually contributed something.
Quite a lot of things, in fact.

> I know that the people which write here publicly are *not* the so
> called "community".
> 
> The population of the language-system "Ruby" consists first of all
> from the thousands of users which do *not* write here.
> 
> They use the language, e.g. to write glue-code for their applications,
> to control a small part of a film-production, a pre-processor, a quick-
> prototype or something that I can't even imagine.

Then how do they communicate? How do you have a "community" of people who 
don't talk to each other?

> Professionals.
> 
> So, where are the professionals, which focus on the technical essence
> and which know that language-evolution has not much to do with
> politics and "freak-shows" or "liking each other" and all this
> nonsense?

It does, however, require communication. Professional communication, which 
means broadening the scope beyond "Give me a seven-letter word that means 
require_relative, and don't change the subject!" It means actually discussing 
actual issues, not inventing them out of thin air and refusing to provide a 
single real scenario where they are useful.

And it does mean courtesy. Not "liking each other", but common courtesy.
 
> If you like to confirm my sayings, but you don't want to do it
> publicly, please feel free to contact me with private email.

Of course, because then you can come back and claim you had a lot of people 
respond to you in private.

I have so far seen one person defend you, but he wasn't defending you 
personally, just didn't like the fact that people reply to your brand-new 
thread with "don't feed the troll." I suspect these are people who don't have 
experience dealing with you.

To those replying: If you think I'm wrong, I do want to know about it. Please 
_do_ respond publicly, and tell me why I'm wrong. I'm willing to change my 
mind, really.

Ilias, of course, will respond publicly, but won't tell me why I'm wrong. 
He'll just dismiss what I have to say out of hand. He'll even do it in so many 
words.

Hey, Ilias, prove me wrong. Write a professional response, for once.
Hell, even read my whole email -- that's a rare treat, coming from you.