comp.lang.ruby

The group and its era

Ruby was already several years old by the time its English-speaking readers were given a newsgroup. Yukihiro Matsumoto announced version 0.95 of the language on Japanese domestic newsgroups on 21 December 1995, alongside the ruby-list mailing list, and for the rest of the decade the centre of gravity stayed in Japanese. An English-language home page and the Ruby Application Archive followed in 1998, and the English-language ruby-talk list in 1999. comp.lang.ruby came last: proposed by Conrad Schneiker at Matsumoto’s suggestion, it went to a Big-8 ballot that closed on 20 April 2000 and carried on its first attempt, 200 votes to 16, with the group approved in the first days of May.

The newsgroup and the list did not start out as one conversation. They diverged from the moment the group was created and ran apart for about a year, until in mid-2001 Dave Thomas built a two-way gateway between them — some two hundred lines of Ruby — after which a message sent to either appeared in the other. That is why the ruby-talk archive holds most of the newsgroup’s traffic from mid-2001 onwards, and why reading the group means reading the mailing list too.

The years the news2mail gateway ran, 2000 to 2004, were almost exactly the years in which Ruby stopped being a Japanese language with foreign admirers. By early 2002 ruby-talk was carrying more messages than the older Japanese ruby-list. Anyone arriving from an English-language weblog of that period — the sort of 2001 enthusiast post that sent readers here in the first place — was arriving at the moment the balance tipped.

What was discussed

The defining feature of the group was the shortness of the line to the people who wrote the language. Because list and newsgroup were mirrored, a beginner’s question about iterators could be answered in the same thread by the language’s designer or a core committer, often writing in a second language. That was an unusually direct line to a language’s author, and the group’s manners reflected it: patience with newcomers was close to a house rule, and the ethos was later condensed into the community initialism MINASWAN — Matz is nice and so we are nice.

Much of the rest was the ordinary business of a language group. Idiom threads: how a thing was properly done in Ruby rather than translated out of Perl or Python. Comparison arguments, of which the most durable was whether Ruby was best understood as a better Perl or as a practical Smalltalk — a question its own designer had effectively answered by drawing on both, along with Lisp, Eiffel and Ada. Blocks and iterators were the feature converts wrote home about.

Alongside that ran the structural traffic that every comp.lang.* group carried: release announcements, notices of new libraries with a pointer to the Ruby Application Archive, portability reports from whichever Unix or Windows build had just failed, requests for review of somebody’s first extension, and bug reports with patches attached — a newsgroup thread serving as the issue tracker a young project did not yet have. Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the ‘Pickaxe’, was the first English-language book on Ruby, and it became the standard reference for readers who had no Japanese.

Context

A language earned a comp.lang.* group by argument and ballot, under the deliberate creation process the comp.* hierarchy inherited from the Great Renaming. That made the namespace a rough census of which languages had reached a working readership, and it made each group the same kind of institution: a single public room for idiom, portability, library announcements and bug triage, read by implementers and users at once. Ruby joined a street whose older addresses — comp.lang.c, comp.lang.perl.misc, comp.lang.python — had been settled for years.

What ended the arrangement was success. Ruby on Rails, released as open source in July 2004 and reaching version 1.0 in December 2005, brought in newcomers on a scale a single general-purpose group was not built for, and brought them in through the web rather than through a newsreader. Framework mailing lists, forums, weblogs and later code-hosting sites took the traffic; the newsgroup thinned, while the gatewayed list continued.

The record that remains is therefore a narrow and unusually clear one: an English-language language community in the four or five years before it became a large one, with the designer in the room. The surviving archive is patchy in the way all Usenet archives are, and the postings made before the gateway was built sit only on the newsgroup side of the mirror.