What should all those lines of C out there be rewritten in? What should they have been written in to begin with?

Ha! That's for the last part where you implied that Iran has shown a hottinanny of interest *who* is in the White House. Actually I guess that goes for the whole thing. The idea that Iran's current political direction has anything to do with the less-than-a-year-old presidency is disingenuously revisionist at best.

Can we both admit that "communicating" and "extending a hand to" are both woefully simplistic reductions of a complicated diplomatic process, and neither of them really mean anything? Yes, I would have liked Obama to publicly denounce the post-election crack-down, but I also think the administration's assessment that it would be detrimental to the movement was correct. The main propaganda tool used by Iran during that time was that they were putting down violent protests instigated by western powers intent on putting them out of business. That propaganda is more obviously a lie if we stay out of the fray - that may not have mattered to the protesters back then, but it does matter for every protest afterward (like the ones right now). How would speaking up have helped the protesters at that point anyhow? Unless we were willing to back up the words militarily, they would have only been detrimental to the movement. We were not then and are not now prepared to face off with the government Iran in a fight that is, at the end of the day, basically the people of Iran's problem.

Nothing. What do *you* think is wrong with communicating with one's enemies?

+1000 on your last paragraph.

In response to your first point - my thing is, how do you ever know when something stops being a fad? Was using 'C' a fad right when UNIX came out? Maybe it was, but it definitely isn't now, so when did it change. Was Java a fad when it first came out? Is it now? For those of who say yes and yes, what makes it so - a *huge* number of people use it to great success. Same goes for Ruby and Python.

Yeah I suppose it's tough to compare for all the reasons you mention (and probably more). By the way, while most popular libraries are still available on RubyForge, the bulk of newer and smaller libraries are on GitHub these days. The availability of distribution-packaged libraries is definitely a valid concern, but IMHO, rubygems are easier to use than CPAN and could or should be more widely distributed by default in the future. Food for thought!

Didn't mean to suggest a comparison with Perl 6, but rather Perl 5.

Don't see any difference in the requirement of mod_rails/etc. versus mod_perl/mod_php/fcgi for those languages. Impossible to argue about start-up time and performance in general, although I think Ruby is working more on that problem than nearly anyone right now (1.9/JRuby/Rubinious/etc.)

The community doesn't seem hugely different than others I have been part of (not many), but of course I'm somewhat of a n00b myself :) It is true that there are lots of "Rails programmers" out there who don't really know Ruby. You don't see that much elsewhere it doesn't seem.

It might just be because I'm not a very experienced Perl programmer, but I find the libraries in the ruby community to be easier to find, easier to use, and of generally higher quality. Could you point me to some examples of libraries that you use in Perl but could not find in Ruby?

Hmmm, I'm not sure in what ways Python could be considered in any way similar to VB, so I can't respond to that, but I thought someone should point out the irony of a Perl programmer being afraid of new tools. You sound just like the who were afraid of "scripting languages" back when Perl was an infant.

That sounds like violence to me...

Fair enough! I was only referring to the original topic. (I don't like the credit racket any more than anyone else).

Pardon me, but this is public data. The internet is public. Anything posted on the public internet is public. So *my* follow-on question is, Why does everyone thinks it's OK to bitch about things they have posted in the most public forum in human history becoming...well, public? How can this be considered spying? If you write something on your blog or in a comment on someone else's blog or on twitter or on youtube or *wherever on the internet* it *will* be public - can we please move past thinking otherwise?

You sir, are full of it.

How come nobody has given this lady a staunch "Hear hear!" yet? Is it because all the men are afraid it will ruin their careers?? In any case, "Hear hear!"

Sorry khasim, you seem like a reasonable fellow, but you've posted this so many times as if it is somehow the nail in the coffin of the argument that I think it deserves a response. Flatly, your statistics are complete bullshit.

First of all, the percentage of females in the FOSS community is completely irrelevant. If you get a group of dudes together in a room to talk shit about women, the fact that the percentage of women in the group is 0.00000% has no bearing on whether or not the group has sexist tendencies. The amount of sexism you are "allowed" in a group is not somehow proportional to the percentage of women in that group. I don't know what else to say about it than to reiterate that it is a completely irrelevant point.

The second part of your point is better - namely, you say that only 0.1% (totally made up number, but whatever) of the comments are sexist, and that's pretty good. I agree, if you're right that 0.1% of all FOSS related commentary is sexist, that is really pretty good, and while it's probably impossible to get the numbers to back it up, I'd say it's better than the population at large. However, this isn't a victory for the FOSS community, it's a defeat for the population at large. Being less bad than average does not make you good. We should strive for 0%, we should strive for 100% acceptance of all the various backgrounds of the members of our community. 99.9% is good, but it's not *that* good.

That's the REAL problem we'd like to solve. We'd like to do much better.

Hooray! Thank you for the first comment so far with real examples and a link we can check out for further research (for those of us who are curious about the issue and uninformed)