Despite the obvious irresponsibility of Thomas's post (why in the world would you send something like that into a community of people not guaranteed to be CLI savvy? Even as a joke, it's totally unfathomable.), I think the TM list is one of the most on-point lists I've ever belonged to.
There are lots of ways to ask "why would you want to do that?", and many of them are justified. Typically, the real question is "what's your goal here?", and reasonable people can reasonably dispute about whether a particular tool can or should be used to reach a particular goal.
TM might be reaching its terrible twos though, where there are enough people who have been using it for long enough, that there could be a division of the community into newbies and old-timers. It's up to the old-timers to keep the in-jokes to a minimum and welcome mat before the door.
jb
Am 23.07.2007 um 14:27 schrieb Andy Armstrong:
A couple of recent posts asking perfectly reasonable questions about TextMate (can you open documents R/O, can you split the screen) have attracted answers in the spirit of "why would you want to do that?" or "here's a command that will erase your hard drive luser". The latter a particularly stupid and frankly unexpected contribution from Thomas.
I know TM has a lot of fans in the Ruby community. I wonder if we're seeing the same attitude that hangs around Ruby like a bad smell ("you can't write a DSL in any language apart from Ruby", "wow! That's just not possible in other languages") applied to TextMate.
Assuming there's at least some overlap between the two groups of fanatics I'll attempt to address both at the same time: please wait until you've had experience of other languages / editors before you start condemning everthing not-Ruby or not-Textmate.
Ruby and TextMate are both excellent tools; both have limitations and misfeatures as all non trivial software does. Neither will continue to improve if their fans believe them already perfect.
"And what should they know of England who only England know?" Rudyard Kipling, The English Flag