About Steve Yegge's 'Opinions considered harmful' post

[Gregory Brown]

Excuse me, but where in this post does anything about Ruby arise?

Maybe you misjudged the 'opinion' topic. Or maybe we're not on the
same page. I thought it to mean opinions about Ruby, the way it
works, even the community, and things directly related to it.

Your last two posts, though I disagreed with them, were well within
this definition. You were even syndicated in a few places with people
singing your praises. Deleting them seemed a bit rash to me, but I
didn't mind seeing them go seeing as they were a bit accusatory
towards the Python community, as you had mentioned in your last post
to the mailing list.

This last post however is simply uncalled for. Simply because James
Britt and I mentioned that we disagreed with you does not merit such
open hostility. What exactly are you trying to prove?

 

[Gregory Brown]

Whoops. Wrong ML... sorry.

 

[Gregory Brown]

This last post however is simply uncalled for. Simply because James
Britt and I mentioned that we disagreed with you does not merit such
open hostility. What exactly are you trying to prove?

I guess since this post is already on the archive, and a few people
already emailed me off list asking what the hell this was about, I
should mention I was talking about this article:
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/opinions_considered_harmful.htm=
l

Which was partly in response to my article:
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/ruby_is_not_a_religion.html

Which was in respose to two articles Steve Yegge has since deleted.

Sorry about the mixup folks.

 

[Ross Bamford]

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 18:23:27 -0000, Gregory Brown

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/opinions_considered_harmful.html

Which was partly in response to my article:
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/ruby_is_not_a_religion.html

I'm really loving this whole 'us and them' community that seems to be
growing now. It really worked well for Java - rarely have I known a group
of people so keen to point out each other's flaws.

For every silver lining, eh...

 

[Gregory Brown]

On Fri, 30 Dec 2005 18:23:27 -0000, Gregory Brown

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2005/12/opinions_considered_harmful= html

I'm really loving this whole 'us and them' community that seems to be
growing now. It really worked well for Java - rarely have I known a group
of people so keen to point out each other's flaws.

That really wasn't my intentions, though I can see where you are
coming for. I was thinking more along the lines of us and us who see
things just a little bit differently. No desire to go to war or make
a big deal 'bout anything.

 

[Ross Bamford]

That really wasn't my intentions, though I can see where you are
coming for. I was thinking more along the lines of us and us who see
things just a little bit differently. No desire to go to war or make
a big deal 'bout anything.

It was just the before/after Rails thing really. I'd guess that a lot of
people whose first real exposure to Ruby came through the Rails hype (like
me) haven't used Rails much since. I know I find web programming extremely
boring (though it's good to know I can pull RoR out of the bag next time I
_have_ to go there so it won't be so bad) but for me the fun has always
been in exploring the language and finding uses for it.

I'm still amazed by how strong the Ruby community is so I'm probably
over-sensitive to anything that might cause the familiar old attitudes to
develop. Definitely didn't mean to make a big deal of it, it's probably
just that 'foo' / :foo thread exerting militant influences on me...

Cheers,

 

[Gregory Seidman]

]
} It was just the before/after Rails thing really. I'd guess that a lot of
} people whose first real exposure to Ruby came through the Rails hype (like
} me) haven't used Rails much since. I know I find web programming extremely
} boring (though it's good to know I can pull RoR out of the bag next time I
} _have_ to go there so it won't be so bad) but for me the fun has always
} been in exploring the language and finding uses for it.

I came to Ruby because I had been resisting learning Perl and Python for
years. Perl because of its unholy nastiness (I can still understand the
shell scripts I wrote a decade and a half ago; can anyone say the same
about a perl script written even a year ago?), and Python because of its
significant whitespace (there are those who say it's a feature; let's agree
to disagree). Finally, a scripting language with pleasant syntax, a strong
community, and a rich ecosystem of libraries springs up. Even better, it
has the main benefits of Perl (regex wizardry) and the good design sense of
SmallTalk. Once I learned about that stuff, I decided I would learn it.

Granted, it was not until I decided to develop a Rails app that I actually
got around to learning it. And I was delighted both by the ease with which
I developed the toy web app I was working on and the pleasure of using the
language itself.

Oh, and why did I actually need to learn a scripting language (other than
awk/sed/sh which I know well already)? I didn't. I just felt the itch to
learn a new language.

} I'm still amazed by how strong the Ruby community is so I'm probably
} over-sensitive to anything that might cause the familiar old attitudes to
} develop. Definitely didn't mean to make a big deal of it, it's probably
} just that 'foo' / :foo thread exerting militant influences on me...

Heh. I read the first half-dozen posts of the symbol/string issue and since
then I have been deleting them by subject (actually by thread; yay mutt!).
It is the way of mailing lists.

} Cheers,
} Ross Bamford - (e-mail address removed)
--Greg

 

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I came to Ruby because I had been resisting learning Perl and Python for
years. Perl because of its unholy nastiness (I can still understand the
shell scripts I wrote a decade and a half ago; can anyone say the same
about a perl script written even a year ago?), and Python because of its
significant whitespace (there are those who say it's a feature; let's agree
to disagree). Finally, a scripting language with pleasant syntax, a strong
community, and a rich ecosystem of libraries springs up. Even better, it
has the main benefits of Perl (regex wizardry) and the good design sense of
SmallTalk. Once I learned about that stuff, I decided I would learn it.

Hmm ... I moved from (n)awk/sed/(k)sh to Perl (4) precisely *because* of
the readability! This was about 10 years ago. In particular, I never
have found ksh particularly readable. Before Perl, all I used ksh for
was executing (n)awk scripts, and I rarely used sed at all. Most of this
"application" was written in awk, and worked with either nawk or gawk
but not with pure awk.

Times change ... if I were implementing the pacakge now I'd use Ruby
instead of the mix of Perl and R it has evolved into from the original awk.

Granted, it was not until I decided to develop a Rails app that I actually
got around to learning it. And I was delighted both by the ease with which
I developed the toy web app I was working on and the pleasure of using the
language itself.

I think a lot of us discovered Ruby from being immersed in the Rails
hype. I actually discovered it about two years ago in connection with
computer music; Ruby is used in the GridFlow package. But I never took
the time to learn it then, or even mess with GridFlow -- I moved back to
Lisp, which is where much of the experimental music community resides.

Oh, and why did I actually need to learn a scripting language (other than
awk/sed/sh which I know well already)? I didn't. I just felt the itch to
learn a new language.

I wanted to learn web application design specifically rather than Ruby.
I suppose I should have picked PHP to learn, since a lot more web apps
are written in PHP than Ruby/Rails. I may yet learn PHP, but certainly
from the point of view of language design elegance, Ruby is light-years
ahead of the "big three" scripting languages -- Perl, PHP and Python.

Strangely enough, the one "wart" on Ruby in my opinion is the
continuation of the UNIX/vi/awk/sed/perl "tradition" of regular
expression syntax and semantics. I appreciate its usefulness and its
ubiquity, certainly, but it is decidedly awkward to me, even after
having used it for 20 years. Using it represents a thinking mode shift
for me; it's as if my programs are speaking two different languages.
Perhaps Matz can earn a lasting place in the computer science Hall of
Fame by developing a more elegant way to do these tasks "The Ruby Way".

 

[Chad Perrin]

They are simply "sub-languages" that every general-purpose language must
contain to support the two main low-level uses of computers, number
crunching and text processing. They are the DNA of computing, as it
were. Still, I'd love to see a more elegant way to do string processing
than something like Perl's

$_ =~ s/^\[.+\] //g;

. . use the $_ implicitly?

 

[Doug H]

Excuse me, but where in this post does anything about Ruby arise?

Maybe you misjudged the 'opinion' topic. Or maybe we're not on the
same page. I thought it to mean opinions about Ruby, the way it
works, even the community, and things directly related to it.

Your last two posts, though I disagreed with them, were well within
this definition. You were even syndicated in a few places with people
singing your praises. Deleting them seemed a bit rash to me, but I
didn't mind seeing them go seeing as they were a bit accusatory
towards the Python community, as you had mentioned in your last post
to the mailing list.

This last post however is simply uncalled for. Simply because James
Britt and I mentioned that we disagreed with you does not merit such
open hostility. What exactly are you trying to prove?

Steve Yegge republished his articles here:
http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/anti-anti-hype.html
http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/bambi-meets-godzilla.html

It's a shame all the instructive comments on the original posts were
lost thanks to all this.