Why write all that when you could have just said
"I'm sorry"?
"Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" in the context you posted it was a put down. plain and simple. It was rude, and uncalled for.
Refusing to apologize and choosing instead to focus half of your post, on the largely irrelevant issue of whether someone saw misogyny in what your tweet, after spending the other half defending your indefensible original tweet, just strikes me as particularly arrogant and unpleasant.
The real issue here is that on twitter (in certain circles), snark is encouraged/rewarded and looked upon as some proxy for individual brilliance, except this time, you hurt an actual person.
So this one time, chalk it up as an L, say you're sorry and move on with your life, because this post doesn't make you look thoughtful, or smart or decent, just the opposite actually.
The way I read zeeg's post, he never said "I'm sorry" because he felt he had nothing to apologize for. Of course, you are free to pillory him for his petty slight as much as he is as free to maintain his stance.
I think you should have stopped after the first sentence. Everything after that is condescending and written in exactly the opposite manner you want OP to behave.
At least he just sarcastically criticized a piece of code without any personal attacks unlike your post.
What personal attack? I don't read anything as condescending either.
I do, however, find the OP slightly condescending. His main concern seems to be responding to a comment about misogyny (as if that's the meat of the discussion) and otherwise saying "Oh, it's so hard to communicate in 140 chars - you should cut me a break." [1]
The OP passed judgement on some code he found on the internet and decided to publicly ridicule it. Sure, that's his call. Just as it is for everyone else who wants to explain that's it's wrong. It won't be the last time this happens on the internet.
> Twitter makes it so hard not to accidentally be an asshole.
Give me a break. These guys were acting all superior and they got busted. These attempts at justifying what they said just make them seem like double ass-holes. Just admit you were being horrible or stand by your comment and tell everyone to get lost.
These Ruby guys (aside from Corey Haines) are displaying some real lack of emotional maturity here. These are the sorts of apologies I'd expect from a teenager.
If this is what I can expect from the community after _why's disappearance, I'm going to steer clear of Ruby. Matz being a good guy is not enough to make up for some of a community's most visible figures acting like entitled jerks.
I'd really like to point that this is the Rails community. There's a lot more hidden beyond all this, where people do behave like Matz shows. Projects like vagrant spring to mind.
You are absolutely correct! I'm afraid in some ways the Rails community does the Ruby community a disservice, because even some of the people like me who dabbled in Ruby before Rails existed have forgotten that there's more to the Ruby community than Rails-centric projects.
Steve Klabnik is a Ruby Hero and one of the most present Rails commiters and evangelists. Yes, the community doesn't tweet, but its elected champions do.
The parents post shows precisly the effect of personal behaviour to the communitys image. Hiding behind the group is harmful for it.
I guess with the benefit of hindsight another way to approach this would have been to have written a short blog post on what the issues are with the open source project in a constructive way, send out the same tweet but instead link to the blog post rather than the GitHub page.
That way the Tweet would have got just the same amount of clicks and (initial) shares but the blog post it linked to would have put the thoughts in context and would have avoided the risk of this tweet (who's main criticism in isolation is that it is overly offhand) being mixed in with all the other actually unpleasant tweets.
But, as always, the world could have been perfect in hindsght
I don't think the tweet "Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" is really malicious or a problem. It seems to have just been picked up as part of the other twitter comments that really were malicious and a problem. If the other tweets didn't exist, I doubt anybody would have had a problem with that one.
Not reinventing the wheel is a valid opinion, although in this case there are valid arguments why reinventing it (windows, learning, preference) is a valid thing to do.
Realistically though, I could have. I didn't. It doesn't really matter why. I didn't follow what others said, so maybe it was a lot worse, but I do agree that what I said could not have escalated into what this is.
I wonder how critical the HN community would have been if the exchange was with a female programmer? If you read the exchange, you'll see other commenters defending Linus' blunt responses. Linus was harsher than David or Steve, he called the pull requester a moron.
But in this case, Heather didn't ask those guys to use her code. They just decided to have some fun at some code totally unrelated to them. Not even explaining what's so funny.
In that pull request Linus actually explains quite extensively why he doesn't accept it.
It's also a large organization that rightly should be open to criticism for the sake of improvement, not a single programmer working on a personal project.
Linus didn't say "This is shitty code, no.". Linus said "I don't accept GitHub pull requests for these (logical) reasons. Please use the official route to send me a pull request."
This is a completely different thing to what happened here.
I think it's referring to the later posts in the thread, such as:
"Btw, Joseph, you're a quality example of why I detest the github
interface. For some reason, github has attracted people who have zero
taste, don't care about commit logs, and can't be bothered.
The fact that I have higher standards then makes people like you make
snarky comments, thinking that you are cool.
"Ever wanted to make sed or grep worse?" in the context you posted it was a put down. plain and simple. It was rude, and uncalled for.
Refusing to apologize and choosing instead to focus half of your post, on the largely irrelevant issue of whether someone saw misogyny in what your tweet, after spending the other half defending your indefensible original tweet, just strikes me as particularly arrogant and unpleasant.
The real issue here is that on twitter (in certain circles), snark is encouraged/rewarded and looked upon as some proxy for individual brilliance, except this time, you hurt an actual person.
So this one time, chalk it up as an L, say you're sorry and move on with your life, because this post doesn't make you look thoughtful, or smart or decent, just the opposite actually.
Cheers.