Article: The JS Community has a Bullying Problem

[AstonJ]

@josevalim

For such, I would love to have even more introductory Elixir materials, such as “Introducing Elixir”.

I’d love to see a ‘Learn to Program’ book on Elixir, similar to the one written by Chris Pine - I loved that book because it made me feel like I could become a programmer (as well as of course teaching me the basics at the same time).

@rodwatkins

But… there is one thing I would warn the community about. There are some, I fear, that see people like me–amateurs with a keen interest in programming–as a problem or as an annoyance.

Similarly, I think newbies have to remember that this works both ways. Let me give you my own background before I elaborate.

When I started learning Rails I watched some of the ‘blog in 15 minutes’ videos and a few guides and tuts and then started on my first project. I went to the IRC chat room and asked loads of questions and got lots of help. However, I always felt that I was asking daft or really simple questions (and they were exactly that, simple). Anyway one day Ryan Bigg suggested I pick up a book on Ruby and learn it - he promised that I’d easily be able to do all of the things I was asking about if I learned Ruby because Ruby, and what I was asking of it was real simple. For some unknown reason to me, I had not considered buying a book or learning the language from scratch. So I took his advice! Best thing I ever did! And he was right - after learning the language and the framework I was able to do pretty much anything I wanted to and I stopped feeling like I was burdening the community with things that I really should have known by making the effort to learn them.

Anyway back to my point - I think it’s only fair that all of us who are new to a language should also do our bit as well - and put the time and effort into learning the language by using books or other respected resources… resources that people in the community have taken a lot of time to put together for us.

This is one of the reasons why I added a ‘Which books have you got/read’ field to our profiles here on the forum - not only to encourage people to read books but also for members to see which books the OP may have/have not read, so they can perhaps answer the user’s question and at the same time recommend a book on the specific topic for further or better insight

[Forseth]

@rodwatkins

I am an amateur programmer who has taught himself several languages over the years: visual basic, C#, python, ruby, js and now, my favorite, elixir. I have no formal training in programming at all.

My favorite kind of programmers. people who love programming so much they spend their free time in pursuit of learning. if a community cant appreciate their questions the community is lesser for it.

What someone might consider a stupid question, someone else will consider gold as it allow them to take on a new perspective on a problem they are trying to solve. This has happened more than once with me.

I don`t have a formal education with programming apart from an assembly course I took through University. I was a farmer and a mechanic turned into a programmer for hardware.

[Qqwy]

I dare to say that there are no stupid questions; there are only bad answers.
True, someone might ask a question that is ‘unexpectedly beginner’, but especially on the internet it is wrong to presume that people already know everything. The worst thing you can do when someone asks a question, is to reply ‘that is a stupid question’. Besides, when someone asks a question on the internet in public, usually there are other people in the future looking for the same or a similar question that will come across this particular conversation.

Something similar to me recently: starting to learn C++, I dared ask some questions about why certain things were the case in the language. It is really frustrating to receive as single reply: ‘Go read a book’.

I’m very happy with the amazing efforts of all our Elixir community members . Please stay the way you are. I love you all !

[OvermindDL1]

I always try to respond to questions the way that I would want to be responded to any given question. I like details, examples, and documentation, so I always try for that. ^.^

In the JS community I’m not in much of really any of it, was in elm for a bit and the elm community seems downright hateful in many ways (some people have emailed me directly thanking me for my answers in elm compared to the others, so it is definitely things people notice) and in many cases. The RTFM ideals is strong there.

However, I’ve been using bucklescript in my projects and its build system just had a major upgrade with features so I can toss out other stuff now. ^.^

I might actually make a blog about it soon about how to integrate it easily into an elixir phoenix project.

[sotojuan]

That’s funny considering Elm is a) advertise as being strongly geared towards beginners and b) doesn’t have the best docs so not sure what you’re supposed to “RTF”

FWIW I’ve heard good things about the Elm Slack, and our Elixir Slack is pretty awesome too.

[PragTob]

I used to run both a JS user group and a ruby user group with ruby being slightly bigger. It astonished me how rude JS people were comparatively. “You switched from CoffeeScript to ES6? That’s stupid!” “if you used this unreleased ES7 feature you could save 2 characters there!” and more fun… The difference was astonishingly noticeable.
What I want to say - I don’t think it’s size alone and culture is a big part and here leadership forms culture. Ruby is pretty good with things like MINSWAN (Matz is nice so we are nice).

I think José does a good job here, I’m still happy every time a PR is commented with a couple of hearts plus nicr answers to very beginner level questions.

That all said - sometimes the Elixir community feels a bit rougher. There used to be someone on the ML who I felt was rude to others and me and a fellow friend also noticed this behavior. Plus once I gave a presentation at a local elixir user group and someone felt the need to point out something he felt I was missing every ~5mins which was mostly answered on the next slide or was somewhat incorrect nitpicking (you need to turn on protocol consolidation - which is active by default since 1.2)

So I think Elixir is on a good way overall, most of my interactions have been great and especially this Forum is lovely. Special shout out to @OvermindDL1 @AstonJ @NobbZ and all the other mods that help make and keep this a nice community!

[DianaOlympos]

@josevalim

But it probably won’t ever happen because teaching and producing documentation is still a very hard job as you need to assume a starting point. The Elixir guides are probably not good for someone who has just started programming, we do use words and rely on abstractions that a new programmer won’t be familiar with and those will lead to questions which are totally reasonable. For such, I would love to have even more introductory Elixir materials, such as "Introducing Elixir

Yeah they are far from perfect, we got a couple of people experiencing that in Slack. I still have a project of working on a more “Beginners to programming with Elixir” concept of guides/book. But time fly. I will see if i can get back to it later this month.