Some incidental writerly advice: Avoid using the word <i>cancer</i> metaphorically, unless you're deliberately trying to parody the writing style of, say, Adolf Hitler. Otherwise it's like trying to use a howitzer to dig postholes in your yard.<p>I first began to notice the dangerous power of this word when I was working in cancer research. To a cancer researcher, cancer is a thing one deals with all day long, but at a very safe emotional distance. You're used to cancer cells; you study them all the time. You spend quite a lot of time carefully raising them in dishes. You give excited talks about how they work. Still, it's hard not to notice that when you tell a stranger on the street what your research is about, there's this little intake of breath.<p>And then I grew a bit older, and some friends and I lost relatives to cancer, so we got the chance to actually experience the process from the patient's point of view. (An opportunity which, fortunately, many young people don't get.) And I gradually realized, at a gut level, what all the fuss was about: Cancer is <i>really</i> awful. Dying of it is awful, and not dying of it is also pretty damned awful, because the treatments are painful, often damaging, often disfiguring, and <i>dreadfully uncertain</i>.<p>Don't use the word unless you mean it. And you probably don't mean it.
It's the latest attempt to define a singular "Ruby community" from a tiny subset someone has encountered and pin FUD on it, giving ignorant third parties a bad impression of Ruby in general.<p>I frequently encounter people who say things like "Ruby is all drama", "I chose Python because Ruby is full of bickering hipsters" or "I've always found rails programmers rather arrogant." Lies (or gross generalizations at best) but at least an understandable opinion when sentiment like this keeps doing the rounds.
Maybe because rails is like a religion-based on faith. As an old-timer who started web programming on perl/cgi I've always found rails programmers rather arrogant and a bit off-putting. I say rails because this seems to be the main driver behind Ruby's growth.<p>Rails seems to work magically for first-timers and without knowing what's happening it allows anyone to build sophisticated web applications. It basically expects you to have faith it will work and as such perhaps it creats a faith based following.<p>What the author is describing is all sympthomatic of many religious groups :)
Maybe not just the ruby community, I feel the same about the node community, from my rather short experience, most of the time I see a lot of them praising ruby/node/etc as the ultimate solution to everything, and that makes me run from those communities and consequently the languages/frameworks, and that is the main reason I dont have much experience with ruby/node the community ends up making me avoid the technologies that may be good or not, I'm not going to argue that.<p>Looking into other communities, specifically Java, C# and PHP I don't see this kind of behavior, yes sometimes someone like that shows up, but from my experience it's less than the previously mentioned.<p>Please note that this is merely my personal experience, but I would like to know other people experiences with these communities.
Maybe the ruby community is a secret sanctum I've yet to be granted access, but I've never identified with or understood these sort of posts.<p>Granted, I'm a superficial participant in things ruby. But if this vogue opinion of the ruby community is only something you can see in some deeply-heated debates in some Google Group or pull-request comments on some repository, your blog post seems more applicable to all of humanity.<p><pre><code> The three virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris. -- Larry Wall</code></pre>
I agree that "cancer" is over the top.<p>I would also say that you are probably better off with the Pareto rule, unless ability and industry are evenly distributed within the community.<p>(I speak as someone who uses Perl and Python for most of his scripting needs, by the way, and is definitely not part of the Ruby community.)
And with that, I'm getting back to work. I enjoy writing with Ruby, and Rails has made web development a joy for me. Beyond that, I don't find these kinds of things interesting in the least. I'd wager that most of its user base (Ruby that is) feels much the same way.