Are we dying?

Ruby
41

On Jun 30, 2014, at 8:06, Wayne B. [email protected] wrote:

I think it could be multiple things. Ruby as a stand-alone language always
seemed to be overshadowed by Rails. When I look in my industry (semiconductors),
most people are still using Perl, with some migrating over to Python and a few of
us Ruby. But, of the non-Perl languages Python seems to be gaining some traction.

There are also now dozens of languages out there for various things (Haskell,
Erlang, etc.) that have also I think added to the perceived ‘decline’. Ruby isn’t
the sexy new language anymore.

Normally I avoid threads like this, but since I’ve been on this list
pretty much since its inception I thought I should pitch in.

I think the problem is not ruby, the language. I think the problem is
ruby-talk, the list and its regulars. I know that I’ve unsubscribed
periodically, esp recently when ruby-forum was spamming us to death. I
know very few, if any, of my cohort bother to read this list anymore.
They all cite the same reason: bad signal:noise.

The specific problem I have mainly centers on the prolific posters
who drown out everything else, esp those who insist on answering every
inane question the help vampires can come up with rather than teaching
them how to teach themselves.

This list used to have the most wonderful signal:noise and we did a lot
to help newbs get up and running. I just don’t see that anymore and it
makes me sad.

I wish the help vampires and their enablers would be redirected to
something more fruitful (or just move them to somewhere else). Then the
rest of us can focus on helping newbs get up and running so they can
enjoy ruby like the rest of us.

42

Am 30.06.14 17:47, schrieb Xavier N.:

I have the impression that MLs globally decline, as Usenet did :(. No idea
why, and no idea whether it is actually true, but hey why not throw a
conjecture, huh? :slight_smile:

I think Stackoverflow may contribute to that, at least for MLs like
this. It is generally considered good practice to at least do a web
search for a solution to a problem before posting the question to the
mailinglist. SO in my experience has often come up with either the
solution or a pointer in the right direction, so that posting the
question on ruby-talk wasn’t needed anymore.

Also I have the impression that some or most of the more fundamental
discussions about the ruby language itself has shifted to ruby-core or
specific redmine tickets.

And then of course Twitter is even more common these days than it used
to be 6 years ago.

I actually don’t think that this is specifically bad (or good) - it may
just be that communication habits have changed, and more specific tools
have evolved.

What I see as a excellent niche for the ML is announcements and
discussions about new or updated libraries, maybe as a place to converge
development or receive feedback and pointers to something useful. Which
is why I’m not bothered at all by the [ANN] posts that are so prevalent
these days here.

My 2 cents,

  • Lars
43

I still use Ruby alongside VBScript, VBA, TSQL, ASP, and a few others,
often in comibination. It’s often the best tool to turn what would be a
lengthy complex script in another language into an easy and flexible
snippet of reuseable code. Building objects makes everything so much
simpler to control :slight_smile:

44

As for the Ruby language, from this tiny vantage point, it seems as
popular
as ever. I’m encountering new users all the time, both live and on-line.

As for the mailing list, I couldn’t say what is causing such a downturn
in
posts. Lots of possibilities, including the existence of more general
Q&A
places such as stackoverflow. IRC still seems rather popular, there’s
still
lots of traffic on Freenode’s #ruby and #rubyonrails channels, although
IRC
still seems to suffer from the rather unfortunate “Welcome to the
Internet”
problem.

As for me, I’m having the most fun writing in Ruby these past several
years; the last time I remember having this much fun was way back in the
late 70’s writing Lisp.

45

Hi all,

Thanks Robert K. for raising attention to the issue.

I’ll throw my own impressions…

ABOUT THE CHANNEL

  1. Mailing list interest are falling (in general) (this is old news).
  • New ways to comunicate are raising and taking place.
  1. Web foruns (like phpbb) are one of the things that took place.
  2. Stackoverflow more recently.
  3. Discourse is probably the future! And it’s in rails!
  4. Lots of rubyists have blogs and concentrate their online activity
    on Twitter (I only recently have adhered to it (@abinoamjr_en))

We could give Discourse a try and move this “community” formed around
the mailing list to discourse.
Same community, new channel. Perhaps it works.

ABOUT THE ACTORS

  1. Most of the old newbies are now experts and don’t enjoy anymore
    joining in basic threads.
  2. Newbies don’t understand that Ruby TALK is not about “Talking”
    (relaxed, chatting) about Ruby. Isn’t that
    obvious?. And they are suprised when they “relaxed” ask to
    the list (as they were at an IRC channel) “Hey everybody, anybody
    could do this homework for me?” and doesn’t get “good” answers.

But there’s freshly debuted ‘experts’ that are still interested in
helping the fresh new newbies. Why not let one help the other? (Well,
there’s the problem of the signal to noise ratio. Would discourse help
with that?)

ABOUT THE CONTENT

  1. The more free Ruby content available in the internet the less prone
    to ask to list people are. So it’s “natural” to the traffic to fade
    down as Ruby solidify itself. (More true if we prohibit the newbies to
    ask anything that is already somewhere on the internet).
  2. If newbies ask freely:
  • Noise raises (but noise for some, signal for others)
  1. Why not segmentate the list?
  • Ruby-newbies for a more welcoming mailing list where people that
    don’t care to receive a lot of traffic with newbie questions could
    join together to welcome, and take care of the new members that are
    coming to help grow our community.
  • Ruby-??? for a more “rigid behavioured” mailing list with a clear
    set of rules to ask and to answer so that it could make it a
    high-quality content list?
  • Could discourse solve this kind of separation well?
  1. And, from a “marketing” point of view, a high traffic list (even if
    it is low quality content) would raise the ranking of the word Ruby
    on the search engines. Advertising for FREE!

Abinoam Jr.

PS: Recently the Rails-BR community is trying to put up a Discourse for
them.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=pt-BR#!topic/rails-br/lNxMSTIEkWM

46

In reply to Eric:

Email also has some great, non-obvious things going for it

  1. We can easily Cc: folks

One reason why I hate emails and love forums:

I don’t have to deal with loads of emails when I don’t want to.

In a forum I can pick when I am active whenever I want to.

Ruby as a language isn’t too interesting to talk about anymore.

Ruby is a tool.

In reallife I can barely talk to any normal person about
programming. Because they don’t care. And they have no
enthusiasm for it either.

It’s mature at this point and its strengths and weakness
are well-known

Even years ago that made zero difference, so I am unsure
of what you compare here really.

Right, the quality of Ruby documentation has gotten much
better in recent years (thanks to the likes of drbrain and zzak!).

No. The quality of ruby documentation still sucks.

I say this with like 10 years of using ruby - and still using it.

The problem was that 10 years ago the documentation sucked even
more. It has definitely improved, yes, but it is still a steaming
pile of unusable shit in many areas.

Now you can turn a blind eye to it and just lull yourself into
believing that ruby has an awesome documentation.

Ruby is an awesome, beautiful language - but the documentation
is something to be ashamed of.

As for the mailing list, I can tell you two things:

  • Without the forum here, I would not have used the mailing list at all.

  • It is true that the discussion culture somewhat changed, and less
    interesting talks happened on the mailing list. chris2 pointed this out
    years ago already.

  • Other sites such as stackoverflow have had a HUGE impact on the
    mailing list. People cater towards it and often get quickly answered
    there. AND they receive karma points or reputation! You don’t get
    reputation here really…

I think the next major boost to ruby will be mruby. If it can be on
equal level as lua, then perhaps finally more games will use mruby for
embedded scripting rather than lua.

47

(Adding Sam to the Cc:, since he works on Discourse but I’m not sure
if he’s subscribed to ruby-talk. (I think Sam must be subscribed to
respond to this post, though))

full thread here:
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/428556

“Abinoam Jr.” [email protected] wrote:

  1. Stackoverflow more recently.
  2. Discourse is probably the future! And it’s in rails!

AFAIK, Discourse is as much JS as it is Ruby.

  1. Lots of rubyists have blogs and concentrate their online activity
    on Twitter (I only recently have adhered to it (@abinoamjr_en))

We could give Discourse a try and move this “community” formed around
the mailing list to discourse.

Some of us don’t like JS or bloated GUI browsers at all.

However, I understand Discourse is working on email integration,
so maybe that concern is moot…

Email also has some great, non-obvious things going for it (which I hope
Discourse supports):

  1. We can easily Cc: folks who may be subject matter experts but not
    on a particular list. This is unfortunately uncommon on Ruby lists
    because they tend to require subscriptions.

    For example, I’m roping Sam into the discussion in hopes he can
    chime in on Discourse :wink:

    Thus email addresses must remain visible and non-obfuscated.

  2. Fallback to private email is important in case:
    a) the list server goes dead
    b) the conversation needs to become private

    That means no obfuscating/redirecting emails to go through a
    central server.

Why I do not contribute to Discourse (or a lot of projects nowadays):

  1. Contributor License Agreement - this is a showstopper
    The Free Software Foundation is probably the only organization
    I can trust with this.

  2. It’s unclear if contribution is possible via Free Software only
    (that means not using proprietary web services).

But there’s freshly debuted ‘experts’ that are still interested in
helping the fresh new newbies. Why not let one help the other? (Well,
there’s the problem of the signal to noise ratio. Would discourse help
with that?)

I don’t know if Discourse would help. Ruby as a language isn’t too
interesting to talk about anymore. It’s mature at this point and its
strengths and weakness are well-known (and work on removing the
weaknesses mostly happens on the ruby-core list :slight_smile:

ABOUT THE CONTENT

  1. The more free Ruby content available in the internet the less prone
    to ask to list people are. So it’s “natural” to the traffic to fade
    down as Ruby solidify itself. (More true if we prohibit the newbies to
    ask anything that is already somewhere on the internet).

Right, the quality of Ruby documentation has gotten much better
in recent years (thanks to the likes of drbrain and zzak!).

  • Could discourse solve this kind of separation well?
    I want less segregation/segmentation, and even merging ruby-talk with
    ruby-core would be great. Every Ruby user is a potential Ruby core dev
    (and every Ruby core dev is already a Ruby user).

Furthermore, it’d be nice to open the lists to non-subscribers and make
it easier to rope in folks who may not be subscribed or paying
attention.

What I’m describing is common practice on the high-traffic git and Linux
kernel mailing lists and works pretty well. Spam isn’t a big problem
with good filtering; rejecting HTML and Bcc: seems to help greatly, too.

48

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 3:41 PM, Abinoam Jr. [email protected] wrote:

(From a lot of time ago) what I see as solution to permit non
subscribers’ posts
is to have a broad list of trusted moderators to “approve” the
“bounced” messages as quickly as possible.

Judging from the posting frequency here currently I do not know how
many moderators we could get.

How many moderators do we have at Ruby T.?

0 - if you count ruby-talk moderators only, there may be people
moderating elsewhere (e.g. I am in a German language Ubuntu portal).

Kind regards

robert

49

“Abinoam Jr.” [email protected] wrote:

How many moderators do we have at Ruby T.?

At Linux Kernel and Git mailing list, is this the way things are doing?

There’s no moderation on those lists, just spam filtering and HTML is
banned. I’m completely against moderation: it doesn’t scale, leads
to censorship (or at least accusations of it), and (I seem to recall)
more legal responsibility.

I’d rather deal with occasional spam/trolls in plain-text format (I have
good mail filters) than running a gigantic browser + website; especially
when our primary form of communication is text.

50

Subject: Re: Are we dying?
Date: Wed 02 Jul 14 05:45:51PM +0000

Quoting Eric W. ([email protected]):

I’m completely against moderation: it doesn’t scale, leads
to censorship (or at least accusations of it), and (I seem to recall)
more legal responsibility.

+1

Carlo

51

On Wed, Jul 2, 2014 at 4:48 AM, Eric W. [email protected] wrote:

(Adding Sam to the Cc:, since he works on Discourse but I’m not sure
if he’s subscribed to ruby-talk. (I think Sam must be subscribed to
respond to this post, though))

It would be awesome to hear from him.

…

I want less segregation/segmentation, and even merging ruby-talk with
ruby-core would be great. Every Ruby user is a potential Ruby core dev
(and every Ruby core dev is already a Ruby user).

Furthermore, it’d be nice to open the lists to non-subscribers and make
it easier to rope in folks who may not be subscribed or paying
attention.

What I’m describing is common practice on the high-traffic git and Linux
kernel mailing lists and works pretty well. Spam isn’t a big problem
with good filtering; rejecting HTML and Bcc: seems to help greatly, too.

(From a lot of time ago) what I see as solution to permit non
subscribers’ posts
is to have a broad list of trusted moderators to “approve” the
“bounced” messages as quickly as possible.

How many moderators do we have at Ruby T.?

At Linux Kernel and Git mailing list, is this the way things are doing?

Abinoam Jr.

52

“Abinoam Jr.” [email protected] wrote:

subscribed to the list.

I’m against opening the list to every e-mail outside it.

Ah, OK, I understand you now, but I disagree. With good spam
filtering(*), no moderation is necessary at all. Even worse,
infrequent outsiders mean moderators forget to process the queue.

(*) I’ve used SpamAssassin for the past decade or so, it’s great!
I’ve started documenting how I use it with inotify (since 2008)
for my personal email and also for public-inbox (same server):
http://public-inbox.org/dc-dlvr-spam-flow.txt

53

Hi Eric W.,

I agree with you, I’m against “moderation” of all e-mails of the list.
As you said, it doesn’t scale.
What I said is a little different. (sorry if I didn’t express myself
well).

Most mail list servers “bounce” all “bad” emails to “approval” by the
“moderators”.
This is almost a “default”.
And most mailing list doesn’t accept mails coming from addresses not
subscribed to the list.
Those e-mails are bounced.

What I’m suggesting is to build a team of moderators to “approve”
e-mails coming from “outside” the list.
For solving the problem that Eric W. have pointed out. (Roping
people outside the list).

So that people “outside” the list that doesn’t want to subscribe to
the list only to post one or two e-mails to it, could get their emails
posted on the list.

I’m against opening the list to every e-mail outside it.

In short:

Today:

  1. People subscribed to the list can post freely and the mailing list
    server redistribute their e-mails.
  2. People outside the list are unable to post. Their e-mails are
    bounced to a moderator address (probably).

What I propose:

  2. Moderators take care of approving legitimate posters from outside the
    list.

Abinoam Jr.

54

As a beginner, struggling to gain a foothold, all I see is that “Are we
dying?” received over 40 responses, while my question has gone several
days with no response whatsoever. I have many questions, but I guess
they are too basic for this forum.

55

Roger, the last question I saw you post I answered in about an hour…

56

Never mind. I discovered there was no file attached to my question so I
deleted the post. Unfortunately, it was too late to delete my post under
this thread.

57

Sorry for the very late reply.

We would be more than happy to host an instance of Discourse for Ruby
talk. We already host http://parley.rubyrogues.com/ (which is private)
and nutted a lot of the mail only issues.

  1. We support reply via email
  2. We support creating new topics via email (if explicitly enabled)
  3. We support “mailing list mode” in which you get a mail for every post
    made.

I completely understand the concern about the CLA, despite Discourse
being GPL it does require a CLA for contribution, we have a few topics
on the issues surrounding:

and
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-the-gpl-and-per-file-notice/7208

We would be 100% extracting out reusable bits of Discourse into MIT
gems, for example we have GitHub - discourse/onebox: A gem for turning URLs into website previews under
MIT and GitHub - discourse/message_bus: A reliable and robust messaging bus for Ruby and Rack under MIT. I would
be more than happy to pull a lot of the mail processing out into its
own gem.

Discourse has a fair amount of advantages when it comes to running a
large group, you could segment out groups that need more private
discussions, or even have “observer only” categories. Talking about
code is easier with syntax highlighting, markdown has its advantages,
search is better and so on.

We could handle a segmented community quite well, you could ignore a
bunch of categories you don’t care about and watch ones you do.

58

Is there a way to allow non-subscribers to post?

Yes we can do that, I would probably shield it to go to a particular
category that can be triaged (each category can have distinct incoming
mail addresses)

Discourse has a fair amount of spam protection built in but we would
need to beef up the anonymous mail in stuff if we were to enable it in
high scale / visiblity.

59

Sam S. [email protected] wrote:

Sorry for the very late reply.

We would be more than happy to host an instance of Discourse for Ruby
talk. We already host http://parley.rubyrogues.com/ (which is private)
and nutted a lot of the mail only issues.

  1. We support reply via email
  2. We support creating new topics via email (if explicitly enabled)
  3. We support “mailing list mode” in which you get a mail for every post made.

Is there a way to allow non-subscribers to post?
ruby-talk unfortunately does not allow non-subscribers to post.

Good spam filtering is required for open-posting lists, though. I
haven’t checked how Discourse filters spam; but ruby-talk (and several
other subscription-required) lists still have occasional trouble with
spam.

be more than happy to pull a lot of the mail processing out into its
own gem.

Cool. It would be great if you guys accepted patches/pull requests via
Discourse/email so users don’t have to login to GH :slight_smile:

Discourse has a fair amount of advantages when it comes to running a
large group, you could segment out groups that need more private
discussions, or even have “observer only” categories. Talking about
code is easier with syntax highlighting, markdown has its advantages,
search is better and so on.

Is there an easy way to download all messages to a mbox/maildir for
offline reading?

I have my mail pager configured to do diff highlighting and use the same
editor for email as I do for code. There’s also some good local search
tools for offline reading. I use mairix (it understands threading) and
I’ve heard good things about notmuch, too.

60

On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 8:56 AM, Sam S. [email protected]
wrote:

Is there a way to allow non-subscribers to post?

Yes we can do that, I would probably shield it to go to a particular
category that can be triaged (each category can have distinct incoming
mail addresses)

Discourse has a fair amount of spam protection built in but we would
need to beef up the anonymous mail in stuff if we were to enable it in
high scale / visiblity.

This is nice. Sam, thank you for offering the hosting. I have never
tried to move a community from one medium to another. Do you guys
think it’s worthwhile trying? If so we should probably collect
feedback to judge how many people here would make the move.

Kind regards

robert