I find the statistics surrounding death to be quite sobering. I was at an annual event with 1000 other people and for whatever reason got to wondering if everyone would return the next year. Being a nerd, some calculations occurred and it turned out that would be pretty much impossible as at least a few attendees would die (of any cause) before then. It's rather stoic but makes me appreciate things a little more.
The Ruby community has lost some fantastic people. Chris, Jason Seifer, Steven Bristol, Jim Weirich, James Golick, and Ezra Zygmuntowicz all come to mind. RIP.
Losing Ezra hit me pretty hard. He was a founder at Engine Yard, and I was a customer for many years. He landed me as a customer because he came out and met me, and without any sort of discussion about business or anything, he just dove into helping architect a solution. I was sold immediately.
Years later I worked closely with him on helping him get his 3D printer company off the ground. Sadly though, he died right in the middle of a very challenging time for him and his company.
The Ruby community has certainly lost a lot of people like Chris and Jim (yet another selfless giant) and Ezra.
The only consolation I can think of is how many more selfless people are in the Ruby community still. And not just the Ruby community, but so many communities just like it.
It never hurts to reach out to people, even if you think they won't respond. If you appreciate someone, tell them. It doesn't need to be over the top praise (unless it is over-the-top-praise-worthy).
It can be simple. For example, I just sent this to someone who I was thinking about just now: "<name>, thank you for taking the time to patiently respond to comments in the PR I submitted. You helped clear up some confusion that I wasn't even aware I'd introduced when describing <the implementation of a complicated thing>. You freed up at least a few hours of my day, which I'm really grateful for."
The Ruby community also seems to attract a lot of fantastic people. I'm not a part of it and never have been but from the outside looking in it looks like one of the most welcoming eco-systems out there.
You're not wrong, but I also think there are fantastic people in most communities oriented around creative, technical projects. I've just been getting into Python as wow, there are certainly some hyper productive interesting individuals there! HN too, of course ;-)
One thing Rubyists were particularly good at, though, was rapidly adopting new methods of sharing ideas, such as screencasting, git, blogging, Twitter, etc. so a lot of Ruby and Rails ideas spread more quickly than they might have from other communities. Currently the Rust and ML communities seem to have this sort of edge.
What strikes in particular about the Ruby community is - in order - a lack of being judgmental (also with respect to other eco-systems) as well as being very welcoming to beginners. That combined with the showing-by-doing attitude has my respect, this is something that should be a standard to live up to.
“They can't be dead: I just spoke to them” is a common response to death. Unfortunately, death can be rather sudden.