Monday, March 10, 2008

Gracious Dave and MINSWAN

One of the things that I always appreciated about the ‘old Ruby community’ was the incredible level of kindness that was exhibited by most posters. MINSWAN (Matz is nice, so we are nice) was the order of the day. As the community has grown, some of that feeling has fallen by the wayside.

Recently though, I saw a wonderful return to ‘the way things used to be’. Since Zed blasted it, it seems to be in vogue to carp about The Pick-Axe book. It might not be the best Ruby book out there anymore, but a lot of people like it and keep a copy handy for the reference. When it started to come under fire in a recent discussion about The Ruby Programming Language, Dave Thomas sent this gracious reply:

I think it’s great that we now have books that suit different people. I’d encourage everyone who wants to get a Ruby book to check out David’s book (and hopefully the PickAxe too). My hope is that the variety of books will simply encourage more people to start using Ruby.

Thanks Dave, for a great example of how we can be nice, just like Matz.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Couldn't agree more. The community was one of the reasons I got pulled into Ruby, and it's up to those of us who care about it to uphold the original values.

Dave is still showing us the way. Let's try to follow as best we can.

Andy Lester said...

MINSWAN is a marvelous concept.

http://perlbuzz.com/2008/03/linswan-an-acronym-we-can-steal-from-ruby.html

Lyle said...

Thanks for blogging this. I saw Dave's response this morning and was also glad to see that he didn't take the bait.

Gregory Brown said...

It's MINASWAN, if memory serves.

"Matz is nice and so we are nice"

Nice post though.