On 8/9/07, Todd B. [email protected] wrote:
On 8/9/07, Robert D. [email protected] wrote:
I’ve read this read. I totally respect everybody’s opinion in this
forum. You guys/gals are truly masters of turning what at first
appears to be a train wreck into something profound (Trans, James,
Robert, Gregory, David to name only a few of you great people). But
please, please don’t get elitist on us lowly programmers.
I don’t think that’s the intention. At least, I wouldn’t want to do
that with my contributions here.
I’m seeing a “sectioning off” of rubyists from nubyists, and I’m a
little frustrated when people start talking about “oh, we should
really bring this up in this other list”.
To some extent I see the same thing, but it doesn’t have to be that
way, and I’d rather it not be. I’ve held the view that RubyTalk is
highly valuable for discussions and getting ideas, but can be somewhat
unwieldy when it comes to decision making.
I totally think that it’s worth discussing RCRs before submitting them
here, getting everyone’s opinions, not just some group of Illuminati
hoarding all the Ruby secrets.
That having been said (and maybe it’s not so apparent to newer
members), every once in a while the same potential RCR becomes a
recurring topic, with only slightly new opinions showing up in each
one. That’s what my original comment about the topic being boring
was. I was more saying, ‘let’s bring this discussion to a place where
some decisions can be made, since this has come up so much before’.
I can see how that might seem a little abrupt without some context,
and maybe I also chose my words poorly. I think if anything what this
thread has exposed is that the RCR process may need some revamping so
that it feels more inviting to people, and so that we can get some
direct discourse going with the folks who can really make these
changes, the Ruby core team.
No disrespect to whoever mentioned that Matz reads RubyTalk, but
although that may be true, I wouldn’t want to put the onus on him to
keep an eye out for discussion here. It’s hard enough for your
average hacker to keep up on posts here, let alone someone responsible
for the language we’re all here because of. 
So I guess what I’m saying is that although some folks find the
possibilities of RubyTalk endless, I think the advantages are a little
more limited. It’d be great to say that all decisions could be made
in the middle of a crowded bazaar, but it’s just not pragmatic, even
in open source communities.
So I hope that we can use RubyTalk for what it’s good for, drumming up
ideas, sharing discussions, solving problems that scale to this level
of traffic with the diverse skill levels of folks subscribed here.
However, I get worried when valuable ideas come up over and over again
but never make it to the next level where they can be acted upon.
Hopefully that makes some sense.
I’m just venting. And I’m attaching myself to this particular thread
because of the signal to noise ratio that, for many of you, seems to
be a festering wound, when, in fact, it could be a blossoming flower.
Sure, I really don’t see the noise here to be a wound, I just feel
like there is a lot of worthwhile discussion that just ends up in the
wrong place. This thread happened to be one of them.
-greg
that everybody can understand