Hey, I have the same feeling for you as I have for Zed. You're both really talented, but that doesn't give you permission to treat people as idiots. However, YOU can give yourself permission to do this. You're totally free to do it. That's why life is so diverse, and I really like how diverse it is.
I agree that there are a lot of people who don't know much about stuff "out there". You can help them, or not. Helping them destroys your elitism a little bit, and hindering them increases it, but the secret is that helping them also gives you a better understanding of things. For absolute beginners, who don't understand anything, and who confuse everything, it's not particularly helpful to behave like this. (and we were ALL there at some stage, and some of us continue to put ourselves into that position because it's useful to learn new skills). I have to say that I land on your side of the fence most of the time. I got REALLY annoyed with Twitter when they publicly complained that Rails didn't do what they wanted it to do out of the box, for instance... this is the attitude most new coders have - that they should get a lot for nothing. The truth is that not many PEOPLE in general have the patience to persist with ANYTHING, and so perhaps you're spending a lot of energy evangelising something impossible for the majority of people, who literally do not have the kind of energy required to put into things, and don't know how to get it if they did want it. Perhaps if things weren't the way they are, you wouldn't be able to have the level of skill you have, anyway: circumstances and situations would perhaps be different. The trouble is, when you behave like this, absolute beginners and others who MAY HAVE A LOT OF POTENTIAL get "burnt". I'm sure you realise this, but perhaps you don't realise that the WAY you write your recommendations (Read the code!) is actually not so helpful to them. It's like an amazing martial art master teaching his student at a level beyond where the student is at. For instance, the fastest way to learn certain striking techniques properly is sometimes to be actually hit by them, but that's not helpful for a lot of people because they don't understand that at that level. For THEM it's counter-productive, because they give up if they are hit, they don't understand why they're being hit. For THEM it's better to be explained to. Of course, the chance is they might just give up anyway, and your effort might be wasted as a "teacher". Look at the movie called the Karate Kid as an example. I've always been interested in the pedagogy, and I think that it's safe to say that there's not "easy way" to avail of knowledge or inspire someone else to act in a way that teaches them. The easiest and best path is usually to minimize wasted effort of oneself, and to provide succinct help. "You need to find out about blah blah. The best way is to look at the source code, here <give reference>, but if you couldn't be bothered doing that, you could pay me some money and I'll help you to learn how to do it". Perhaps... That gives them options. That way they can't whinge, and if there are other people who want to help for free, then they can do that, too. Anyway I'm blahing now :) Have a nice day. Julian. On 13/01/2009, at 11:26 PM, Michael Klishin wrote: > This reminds me: 98% of people in the Ruby community have no skills/ > petience to write a production class > web server from scratch. Why? Because it means you have to know how to > operate pointers, > read a bunch of boring RFCs 10 times, debug shit with gdb and learn > some FSA and > format languages theory to really put Ragel to work. Yet they call Zed > Shaw a bastard. > > He may be is, but tssss! Be silent. You use his work every single > second, in both Mongrel and Thin. > > So please, MyMerbs of all sorts. Shut up. Read code. Don't ask others > to do work for you. Respect Zed. Yo. Peace. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "merb" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/merb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
