Closure, from why the lucky stiff (2013)

Even in the terms of the false dichotomy you've constructed here, I would much rather participate in a community of professionals who've organized themselves around sufficiently overlapping shared intents, than one accreted around the kind of twee, precious narcissism that characterized the early days of Ruby and Rails.

That comparison is informed by direct experience with both, and is the precise reason why my professional experience with both the language and the platform will to my dying day consist of one successful project a few months long.

A good professional community supports a wide variety of learning styles and levels of engagement, and tends to make a lot of resources easy to find for anyone who's willing to put in a little effort of research. The early Ruby and Rails communities did the exact opposite of this. Between "_why"'s guide serving a primary-reference role to which it is manifestly ill suited, and nobody much bothering to document anything effectively outside that, figuring out how to work with their garbage software was like pulling teeth - especially because, in a language constructed as a farrago of the worst ideas from Perl, Smalltalk, and Common Lisp, even reading the source is anything but a guarantee of understanding.

The structural exclusivity alone was bad enough, but the behavior of community leaders quickly demonstrated that the exclusivity was the point. That the "Poignant Guide" should be considered acceptable as primary documentation implies that the function of selecting for people willing to put up with that kind of nonsense was intended - maybe not as a matter of explicit design, although this would not surprise me, but "the purpose of a system is what it does". This system was created by narcissists to select for acolytes, and while I wouldn't quite call it a cult, neither am I prepared to say those who have are entirely wrong. And if it was a cult, it was a stupid cult, because Ruby is a language that makes programmers worse and Rails was never good technology; its sole unqualified success lies in having inspired software engineers to do similar things in better ways.

I'm sure by now I've upset some folks; there are some for whom no criticism of Ruby, Rails, or their leading lights can fail to read as a personal attack. If that's you who's reading this now, all I can say is this shows the difference between us: if you're cut out to be an acolyte, fine, go to it! I would rather be a practitioner in a community of practice. Granted this means my technical documentation comes without cartoon foxes and a level of pretense suited to an early 2000s Abercrombie catalog, but for documentation that actually documents that's a trade I'm happy to make.

The stuff from _why was always wacky but some of their projects were also really inspiring for younger programmers, of which I was one. I could take or leave the cartoon foxes but I remember seeing the code for the Camping framework when it was released and being amazed at how simple and elegant it was.

The ruby and rails community set a path that is followed by many to this day. We're all python programmers now but there'd be no Flask without Sinatra, or Django without Rails. The author of the excellent dependency management tool Bundler went onto work on Yarn for javascript and then created Cargo for rust. Mitchell Hashimoto wrote Vagrant in ruby before starting hashicorp, there's loads of examples like this

I disagree that the Poingant Guide was the primary documentation for anything, it was a quirky guide for new comers. The Pragmatic bookshelf had the definitive guide to the language, as well as the rails book and then a whole series of other publications. I also remember spending a lot of time on the core ruby documentation, which does a fantastic job of covering the extensive standard library.

I also cannot read comic books and, with perhaps the exception of the systemd man pages, likewise thrive on reference material.

Somewhat relatedly, I can't really do podcasts or audiobooks, either, unless they're in a foreign language, and then the challenge of comprehension provides something for my brain to latch onto.