Your own never smells bad
Via Tim Bray, I see that the all too common air of superiority in the Smalltalk community is hardly limited to the Smalltalk community. At a PHP conference Tim attended, this came up in Q&A:
In the plenary Q&A, one question was “ActiveRecord for PHP?” and another was “What do you think of Rails?” The answer to the first was more or less, “We’re not convinced that’s an appropriate direction” and to the second was frankly snotty: “Ruby is appropriate for computer-science-loving people who have a puristic [sic] attitude”.
I'm starting to think that the only difference between the "Smalltalk arrogance" people sense and the arrogance of other communities is the number of people involved.
Comments
the number of people involved?
[Isaac Gouy] November 2, 2006 11:27:23.312
It's not at all obvious what you meant by "the number of people involved" perhaps you could clarify.
The size of the community
[ James Robertson] November 2, 2006 12:02:23.317
Comment by James Robertson
As in, how many people are in that particular development segment
[Isaac Gouy] November 2, 2006 13:28:02.002
Do you mean
- the only difference between the "Smalltalk arrogance" people sense and the arrogance of other communities is that there are a lot fewer Smalltalk people and proportionally more of them seem arrogant?
- the only difference between the "Smalltalk arrogance" people sense and the arrogance of other communities is that as things like PHP are used so much more widely it seems less like arrogance when they say we might not have the purist/best/... approach but we do have a more practical approach?
What do you mean?
Um, Isaac...
[Shade] November 2, 2006 19:35:15.070
.. interesting train of thought there, but I think you are overloading his statement. I believe that all he meant to say was that arrogance was just as bad everywhere, in larger camps you'll just find a higher absolute number of individuals suffering from it.
The rest about "seeming more or less arrogant" seems to be just your own perception :)
[Isaac Gouy] November 3, 2006 1:01:03.602
I think you are overloading his statement
I have no idea what James actually meant.
Part of the reason
[Brian Gridley] November 3, 2006 12:04:10.549
I think part of the reason for "Smalltalk arrogance" is familiarity with only certain other languages. Because some notable competitors are clearly inferior in various aspects, we are prejudiced to think that all other languages are inferior in most aspects.