On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 4:39 PM, Esther Schindler
<esther@bitranch.com> wrote:
I can find links on my own. What I am interested in is personal stories.
What I say here probably isn't something you want to hear, but it might help you, so I'll take a few minutes to say it.
In the one small message above you (probably unwittingly) violated a number of rules of etiquette among a community whose help you were soliciting. Your initial post violated others, though much less egregiously. Complaining about people's attempts to help you comes across as ungrateful and destructive. Nobody questioned whether you _could_ find links, but your question as originally posed was largely answered by information already available. By normal standards of the Lua list (and many other technical lists), you responded to help by insulting one of the key contributors to the community. If you'd looked at the existing material and found it unhelpful, it would have saved time for readers of your message if you'd noted your prior research.
You may have previously come across the classic Eric Raymond article at
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html -- much of what it says could, if you would take it in a constructive way, lead you to be able to better communicate with technical communities. The communities won't adapt to suit your wishes; if we want something from people, it behooves us to learn (and play by) their rules.
I introduced Lua to a large project at a company at which I used to work. With a weekend's work learning Lua and integrating it into the existing C++-based system, it reduced the time needed for us to test out a new idea from an hour to a minute (in many cases). It was also fun to work with.
But a CIO? A CIO should just be aware that dynamic languages offer productivity advantages for some kinds of jobs, and that Lua is an example of a dynamic language that's robust, efficient, stable, clean, and very well suited to embedding in larger systems and for extending them. CIO's shouldn't generally be involved in mandating use of specific programming languages.
Experience suggests no better than a 1-in-10 chance that you'll take this e-mail in a constructive spirit. I hope you do, but if not, then at least accept that it is *intended* constructively. I wish you luck in your journalistic endeavours.
Regards,
James Denett
