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by lparry 4832 days ago
Wow, you're either one of those incredibly rare ruby devs who actually run windows, or you're going to switch your entire environment in order to switch frameworks. Something doesn't smell right
1 comments

I'm a polyglot. I don't encase myself in any 1-thing. I use Mac at work, Windows at home for media and games, and Linux Mint 13 on my laptop for Ruby/Rails. I only used Linux because of Rails, but since I'm switching back (I have Visual Studio 2012 downloading as I type this), I'll have no need for Linux on my end-user machines anymore.
If you do not know your language/framework well enough to adapt it to your circumstances, you certainly are not well qualified enough with said software to list it as something you "know".

This is one of the largest lies perpetuated on this site. If you know just enough of something to follow some tutorials and crank out cookie-cutter sites using Rails/Django/Asp/Grails/CodeIgniter/etc, but fail the moment you encounter basic ecosystem problems, you aren't a polygot. You're a liability to your team for not understanding anything well enough to work around common issues. You're probably curious and love to try new things, but the implied part of being able to proficiently wield whatever tool is correct, or at least on hand, is something escaping you.

If by polygot you mean you know some syntax, the basics of the ecosystem, and generic system design, algorithms, etc while expecting to dive as deep as necessary into any given environment, you're still failing the definition. This would be the point where you RTFS so you know where to override/monkeypatch/workaround.

I don't know who you are, but this comment embodies the bad side of HN. "You" is in the above comment 15+ times - it's so personally insulting and unnecessary. Belittling some stranger's worth to their team is unproductive, toxic behavior. I'm upset I can't downvote this into completely matching the site's bg color.
+1 to you and -1 to the aggressive and insulting comment that prompted you to comment.

I see this a lot on HN too: people who've experience some level of success (as pg would say the first thing you learn when you get rich is that there are many levels of rich : ) and who hence think they know it all about everything and can constantly try to diminish others.

There's a lot of negativity here but, thankfully, there are also others who are here to share, educate and learn.

I disagree. I count writing and selling commercial software with said technology as 'knowing' something. Academics be damned.