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People who are good at writing educational materials need to be paid to do this, because it's hard and takes a long time. I don't see any possible objection to this.I have been paid to do this for five years with practicingruby.com, without ever relying on commercial support. It's 100% reader funded and reader focused, and it's the largest open-access library of Ruby-related articles you'll find in the world.
> Since money and social "buzz" follow the interest of many people, it seems obvious to me that the educational resources should be focused on those areas instead of periphery areas that few people are interested in.
Everything that is popular and commonplace now was a sparsely populated frontier before. Some folks need to venture into that territory now so that we all benefit from their explorations in the future. It would be nice to keep them well supported, if we want to maximize the benefits we'll reap in the future.
> Other people have said this, but favouring people with good communication skills in the job market is part of a functioning meritocracy.
Helping people with good ideas and a good work ethic is a job we can and should do if we possess the means to do so. The exception may not prove the rule, but I suppose you can say that my communication skills are adequate given that this is my essay we're discussing on the HN front page.
The only way I got to where I am was through support of mentors and colleagues who had helped me in the early 2000s, when free and open source software was predominantly a hobbyist activity and not a commercial activity. There was at that time a real sense of doing things for the common good, rather than just to serve your own interests.
And as I've said before: we rank on the first page at Practicing Ruby for
the google search term "infrastructure automation", we're
on the first page for "actor model", first page for
"Law of Demeter", etc. Several of the contributed articles
we've managed to drive so much traffic to are by people who consider themselves intermediate developers, and amateur
writers. I've used the money from my paying supporters to: pay contributors for their work, help them edit, revise, and polish their work, and reach a larger audience than they would have on their own. This model does work! It's just hard to sustain because it's so foreign to most people.
I won't even entertain your comments about the lack of diversity, because it reveals your ignorance on the topic, and lack of concern.