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
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
I think the TextMate community is pretty wonderful by the standards of technical communities in general, and that Allan sets an excellent example by his attitude here. I agree that an unwelcome element of defensiveness is creeping into some of the recent threads, but the helpful replies still outnumber the unhelpful ones by some margin.
I assume that Thomas's dangerous "joke" was merely astonishingly ill-judged, rather than actually malicious.
Robin
On Jul 23, 2007, at 8:27 AM, Andy Armstrong wrote:
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
-- Andy Armstrong, hexten.net
That's was unbelievably idiotic of me. I'm normally not so incredibly stupid and irresponsible.
I take full responsibility for my own comments and they in no way reflect the views of any community.
thomas Aylott
On Jul 23, 2007, at 8:41 AM, Jeremy Bernstein wrote:
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.
You are completely right. That was Idiotic and I will never make such jokes ever again.
thomas Aylott
On Jul 23, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Robin Houston wrote:
I think the TextMate community is pretty wonderful by the standards of technical communities in general, and that Allan sets an excellent example by his attitude here. I agree that an unwelcome element of defensiveness is creeping into some of the recent threads, but the helpful replies still outnumber the unhelpful ones by some margin.
I assume that Thomas's dangerous "joke" was merely astonishingly ill-judged, rather than actually malicious.
Robin
Yes. I am merely stupid, not evil. I'm going to see what I can do about fixing that. -- thomas
On Jul 23, 2007, at 9:07 AM, Robin Houston wrote:
I think the TextMate community is pretty wonderful by the standards of technical communities in general […]
I can only second this.
I found it about as surprising s/o actually followed Thomas' "hint" as the "hint" itself. Like… s/o jumping out of the window because he was told so. Thomas has always been a worthy member of this community. I have 345 messages from Thomas in my TextMate mailbox and he's always been friendly and helpful. It's tragic that somehow this comment made it through Thomas' reality check AND someone really followed the bad advice. We shouldn't judge the whole community for this single incident.
I wish I had a 0.3% error rate in my comments and at the same time I hope my 0.3% error will not be that bad.
Niko.
As a side-note I don't think connecting this list to whatever bad smell you have with the ruby community is helpful in any way.
On 23 Jul 2007, at 20:55, Niko Dittmann wrote:
As a side-note I don't think connecting this list to whatever bad smell you have with the ruby community is helpful in any way.
Yes, you're probably right. I think I was trying to point out that neither community will flourish if it becomes complacent, insular or defensive. Probably a bit of an overreaction there. Sorry folks.
On 23/07/2007, at 10:27 pm, Andy Armstrong wrote:
please wait until you've had experience of other languages / editors before you start condemning everthing not-Ruby or not- Textmate.
fwiw: I've been hanging round the net since before Abraham and I have one rule of thumb that never has failed me: don't get personal. If only that could be the case with blogs...
And, as a relative newcomer to TM, I too have found this list to be much more helpful and on-topic than similar lists for, um, some other text processing applications.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Hi,
Maybe it is because I usually hang out on german ruby boards, but I like the Ruby community because it is relatively resistent to such behaviour. It is no problem to get even the stupidest question answered without a bad word - if your question was totally of the meter, we tell the guy that maybe he should rethink his understanding of Ruby - but that is as far as we usually go.
Greetings Skade
Andy Armstrong wrote:
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.
I think the TextMate community is pretty wonderful by the standards of technical communities in general, and that Allan sets an excellent example by his attitude here. I agree that an unwelcome element of defensiveness is creeping into some of the recent threads, but the helpful replies still outnumber the unhelpful ones by some margin.
I assume that Thomas's dangerous "joke" was merely astonishingly ill-judged, rather than actually malicious.
Robin
Yes. I am merely stupid, not evil. I'm going to see what I can do about fixing that. -- thomas
I would like to try and bring some closure to this unfortunate incident. Yesterday was one of deep grieving for the loss, but all should be well quite soon. My son is more savvy than I about these things and is hard at work to restore my TextMate files, which are all I really need. (Thomas also kindly offered to help.) The TM community has meant a lot to me over this last year. I have found everyone to be wonderfully helpful, including Thomas who has helped me in several personal exchanges to set up nice improvements. Haris got me started last summer and sent many detailed messages. I met a few of you at the Mac Show in SF and had some great conversations. I have fine-tuned my computer, expanded the power of TextMate, learned of other related software such as QuickSilver, and stayed on the cutting edge with everyone's help. In turn, I have converted my students at UC Berkeley to TextMate and tried to duplicate what I have learned for them.
Throughout this, I was like a blind person when it came to Unix. It did not seem I needed to learn this as others in the group were willing to show me code I could simply copy and paste. Before yesterday wonderful things insued! It was beyond my wildest imagination that less than ten letters could wipe out my entire drive in a matter of minutes. (It reminds me of the amazingly short code we used to create Julia sets.) I thought I was taking a little hop with my eyes closed, not jumping off a cliff! This was a freak accident and no one should be blamed.
Be well everyone,
Jenny
-
Andy Armstrong -
Florian Gilcher -
Jenny Harrison -
Jeremy Bernstein -
Niko Dittmann -
Robin Houston -
Thomas Aylott (subtleGradient) -
Tim Mansour