[rorymarinich]

I spent all my time on computers, I played Dungeons & Dragons. I spent all my time up until I was about 15 being shat on, and being incredibly angry because I thought I was being persecuted for my intelligence. Then, in my sophomore year, I took a drama class, realized that people didn't care what kind of person I was as long as I was an interesting person who wasn't too obnoxious, and began to move away from my nerdier friends and towards a much more cosmopolitan group of kids that included film buffs and stoners and snarky hipsters. I'm still friends with a lot of my old friends - I go to college with one - and there's still a latent exclusivity where the group of anime/computer people act pretty rude towards people not in the group.

As was said by another commenter, perhaps it's different everywhere you go. I was in a place where I realized later on in high school that all of the torment and suffering towards nerds had some sort of a logical pull. And my school wasn't some sort of utopia: one dweeby kid in marching band had a bag of shaving cream smashed against his face during lunch as part of a hazing routine. What I noticed from that incident was this: while perhaps that one thing was inevitable, a lot of the sympathy I had towards that poor bullied kid dissolved away when he turned that one single incident into a sort of theater for discussing how unloved he was - particularly since that was the sort of thing I did when I was younger, too.

I wish I'd focused more on the programming aspect of this thing, though, because to be honest high school isn't worth talking about in my mind, not in this context. This was a response to an article titled "Rails is (still) a ghetto", where the author took a similarly hyperobnoxious approach to looking at a problem that didn't require anything obnoxious, and the larger problem is that the world of programming is highly inaccessible to non-programmers.

[jimbokun]

I just want to know how you can hold up the "Rails community" as a positive example of socially well adjusted people, when their acknowledged leader just explicitly approved of a presentation that would obviously result in complaints of sexual harassment in any normal workplace setting (and did result in such a complaint, although given in an almost apologetic tone because she knew that her complaints would not be well received by the Ruby community, and was proven right).

[rorymarinich]

Because the Rails community understands that they are not a community for any other reason other than Rails.

Do I approve of nudity in a presentation? No. But at the same time, even if I found it offensive, I wouldn't turn it into a huge argument and the focal point of a rant against a community.

I'm really, really in the minority with this statement, but I find it very easy to deal with intolerant people. I have friends who are almost certainly racist. A lot of the people I know are casually homophobic. I think that's sickening, but I don't turn that into a rallying point of a campaign. The attitude that I was taught as a kid was that the best way to change things is to lead by example.

Now, being upset over using nude women to draw attention, that makes sense. Voicing displeasure makes sense. But there's a line between that and turning that issue into one that directly attacks the community. When you're part of a community about coding, you'd best be focused on the code. If you don't like DHH, you ignore him. If you don't like Obie Fernandez, you ignore him. The language is what matters, and it's a large enough language that if you know what you're doing, you can find people who are willing to help.

Now, look at the attitude of the Rails community towards beginners: they are incredibly kind and cool and open about it all. (This extends to what parts of the Ruby community I've interacted with.) If you don't know a thing about programming, they'll help you, and they usually come across not as nerds but as socially normal people. I don't know if they really are, but their leaders certainly are: they have their priorities straight. I've never been party to a group of programmers that seemed as normal as the Ruby bunch.

So when DHH applauds the presentation, the message he's giving isn't "RoR approves of this." He's just saying this as a leader. He's saying this as DHH, a rude dude who loves to be crude. The fact that he's the leader is entirely apart from the fact that he's saying this. That's why he's so interesting to read. That's why 37signals is such a good blog. It doesn't matter that they're rich and successful and in charge of stuff: they're a good blog because they write good posts, and all that other stuff is an aside. Meanwhile, in the rest of the programming world people are all-too-quick to judge a person as a single, solid entity. Steve Jobs is evil because iTunes has DRM. Bill Gates is stupid because Windows is ugly. Jason Fried is a jackass who never does work because other people waste their time reading SvN archives. Ruby on Rails is bad because their developers are immature. It's the same approach of solidarity that leads nerds to decide all jocks are stupid, all different people are meaningless, and anything that looks nice can't be nice because it's coming from non-nerds.

[jimbokun]

That was actually a pretty good response. :)

I would say, though, while you are deliberately choosing not to ostracize the Rails community, they are deliberately ostracizing people who don't like porn, or at least people who don't like porn at their tech conferences.

Is this any better than a nerd insulting a cheerleader for asking an unsophisticated programming question? Implicitly, they are saying if you aren't cool or hip enough to not be offended by a pornographic presentation, stay away from our conferences.

A little elitist, no?

[rorymarinich]

I think that the porn thing was pretty tasteless on the part of the presenter. But a part of being civil is avoiding confrontations that you don't have to be in. I used to feel really uncomfortable attending religious services because I was an atheist, for instance, but I've come to the conclusion that while it's awful to lie about what you believe, it's pretty icky to force your beliefs on other people. So while I think that the presenter and DHH are being kind of obnoxious, I accept that DHH's good traits stem from that obnoxious attitude, and I can like his product without necessarily liking that attitude.

It also depends on what you mean by "insulting." Frankly, if a cute girl asks me to program, then I will almost certainly tease her as I help out. I think the porn thing was an attempt at tease that ended up being a bit too insulting. There's definitely a line, but usually if you cross that line people will understand so long as you do.

[bena]

The problem is that it was also the programming community that is pointing out that the guy was being kind of a douche. You are taking a very small portion of the community and extrapolating extremes from that. The plural of anecdote is not data.