[LRUG] IronRuby - beware

[Richard Drake]

Just caught up with this interaction. Observations:

1. There are weaknesses when third parties feel the need to make the public
judgment that John, who started the thread, has lapsed into ad hominem.
Given that he'd been open about his own biases (http://doyoulovems.com seems
pretty clear cut) and he'd asked Ian some straightforward questions about
his, I'd say it was best left to Ian to respond. All that was said about him
is I take it accurate. It struck me as relevant. Of course it was bracing.
But John's point is that the person putting forward a different angle to his
own may also have a personal position to defend (not necessarily venal
commercial ambition but a perfectly natural desire, as a Microsoft-friendly
professional, not to be thought by some of his peers here as aiding an evil
empire).

There are times for policing politeness on the net. This was not one of
them. I would have enjoyed seeing Ian answer without the distraction of
emotional hand-holding. That's mostly because:

2. The issues around Microsoft, open source, IronRuby, Silverlight, the CLR,
the DLR, .NET, code managed and unmanaged, and the rest are really rather
important for many of our futures, and perhaps (rather portentiously) the
future of the planet.

It seems to me that Microsoft has been doing quite a lot of the things it
ought to have been doing to respond to its loss of developer mind-share and
(not in the end unrelated) share of advertising revenue on the net. Have
they done enough for all of us, without qualms, to start writing Ruby in the
client as well as the server, with the unexpected help of the Docklands
Light Railway (sorry)? Or even Smalltalk front and back -
http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com ? If we trust Microsoft this time, will
they play fair in the future? There's the rub.

I do think that a robust exchange of views, pro and con, on such a complex
matter is a reasonable way to go. Not just in the next few days, but in the
coming months.

That's why I suggest that the politeness police take a back seat. As an
alternative form of group therapy, we can each admit that we have a lot
riding on the answers, one way or another.

Richard

-- 
Ruby for laser purity

On 7/27/07, David Townsend <toonsend at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It did come across as quite harsh.  The eternal problem of email as a
> medium.
>
> D
>
> On 7/27/07, John Scholes < j3s1c4 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry, typo, should have been "background or financial interest"
> >
> > js
> >
> >
> > Tom Ward wrote:
> > > On 27/07/07, John Scholes <j3s1c4 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> So just to be clear, you Ian are the Ian Cooper of the London. NET
> > User
> > >> Group. You are a MS Certified Professional and make your living
> > >> primarily doing consultancy on MS products. Is that correct? None of
> > >> that, of course, invalidates your opinion on IronRuby.
> > >>
> > >
> > > This is below the belt; it reads as a pure ad hominem attack.  By all
> > > means question Microsoft and their motivations, but let's please just
> > > attack the arguments, not the people making them.
> > >
> > > Tom
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Chat mailing list
> > > Chat at lists.lrug.org
> > > http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
> > >
> > >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Chat mailing list
> > Chat at lists.lrug.org
> > http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
> >
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20070729/453e96fe/attachment-0003.html>