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by aneth 5137 days ago
I occasionally venture into the IRC rooms for Rails, node.js, or some other technology when I need a quick answer that can't be found elsewhere.

I'm always shocked at how stereotypically asinine and snarky the responses to legitimate questions are. Yes it's IRC, yet somehow I expect it not to live up to its reputation - yet it does every time.
2 comments
JonnieCache 5136 days ago
The rubyonrails channel is indeed awful, because of the demographic of people who use rails right now. The ruby channel is much more civil. They are usually unwilling to help on rails-specific issues though.
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aneth 5136 days ago
> "because of the demographic of people who use rails right now"

What do you see as the problem with the demographic?

While I know historically Rails had a heavy conceited, dickhead user base (in Seattle particularly), the demographic has expanded so much that it doesn't seem to be the case overall anymore.

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JonnieCache 5136 days ago
Thats not what I mean.

I can't really comment on the actual community at large, but in places where people go to get help, such as the irc channel, there are increasingly a lot of people looking for easy answers who don't seem willing to work things out for themselves. More so than in a lot of other languages. I couldn't attribute this to any specific group of people, but I think it has to do with rails increasingly becoming a "workhorse" tool amongst shall we say, less hackerish web devs.

It's basically a sign that rails is being used more for workaday things, perhaps at the expense of .net or PHP. This is surely a good thing. It isn't the same as the mythic internecine rivalries in the rails/ruby development community everyone always talks about, which I've never thought were that important.

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davedx 5136 days ago
Haha, I was in the node.js IRC the other day and found people there to be pretty civil actually. If anything, I was being the snarky one. Not really snarky to people though, more a technical snarkyness.
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pavel_lishin 5136 days ago
What is technical snarkiness, and do you believe that a newbie would be able to tell the difference between it and snark directed at themselves?
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