Ionrock Dot Org

Lately I have been reading a rant or two from Zed Shaw. Seeing as I don't make any kind of rash decisions on a community based on the actions of one (especially when that person appears to be leaving it), I took the entire rant with a huge grain of salt. With that said, of the few rails/ruby projects that I have heard of, mongrel definitely ranks up there as important, so it makes me think. I don't know what exactly it makes me think, but none the less it does ;)

Overall I can't say I've had any problems with the Ruby/Rails community. It has seemed a bit younger than something like Python, which is understandable as it is. It also appears that there are quite a few people want to be considered a part of the community. In other words, there seem to be folks who are vocal that haven't actually contributed enough to be considered as important as they make themselves out to be. This is common, so no surprises here. I'm somewhat used the Python community where, from my experience, seems to keep those not contributing to a relative noise level. Again, that is just my experience. I might also simply be sentimental at the moment, so you can take my comments with a healthy grain of salt.

It does make me wonder what makes a strong community since it is definitely arguable that Ruby has a "better" one than Python. While I never really got into Perl, my understanding is Larry Wall made it what it is due to his personality more than anything. Rails is similar in that it made an effort to be opinionated. Python on the other hand is run by the iron fist of Guido, who is actually a very reasonable person who simply asks for evidence along side code. In a way I think I might have just answered my question

I would suppose that gathering a community is more a matter of encouraging people to participate rather than setting a higher set of entry conditions. In a way this could be construed at elitist. In fact, I heard just that plenty of times before regarding XML and Python. The entry level is set rather high to an extent when it comes to either learning the technologies (XML) or participating in the community (Python). I wouldn't blame someone for considering it elitist if the standards didn't make sense (mainly considering Python here as many XML folks have been frustrated by things like DOM).

I am hoping I get to see more positive sides of the Ruby community. In a way I don't expect much of the Rails community because it is so easy to get started. This is a great feature of Rails, yet I would imagine that many people will be able to have success and feel qualified to call themselves experts. I'm not saying they are or are not experts, but rather, it can be easy to *think* you know more than you know. I say this from experience of course.