So there is some truth to the stereotype of the angry asshole Rubyist?
I thought the community had moved on since those days. I've been tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Clojure next, and this kind of crap is a real turn-off for Ruby.
Do Clojure. Ruby suffers from a number of serious basic errors in its design. I'm in the middle of the long task of writing a clear, substantive criticism of them, but why they were bad choices is quite subtle, though it has large implications. That and Ruby has a culture of little or no documentation, even of the standard library, no attempt at consistency in APIs, even for something as basic as different kinds of network socket, and a community with rather more noise and rather less experience than makes me comfortable.
As much as the "truth" of the stereotype of the jock PHP developer or smelly, fat, bearded C developer. That is to say, those people surely exist within each world but it's a shame when others lack the peripheral vision to see the true, bigger picture without falling into stereotyping.
I'm not a regular user of either, but I've much more enjoyed my time playing with Clojure and lurking in the community. For the most part they seem like solid people.
> There is no "open source hivemind" so please don't
> disparage the millions of open source coders who
> will never make the frontpage of HN by lumping the
> entire conglomerate into one community.
Having tried Ruby for a year, I have experimented this myself. With a strong OOP background, I can assert that it's not even an elite that enjoys ridiculing noobs.
I thought the community had moved on since those days. I've been tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Clojure next, and this kind of crap is a real turn-off for Ruby.