I did not at all expect what this article turned out to be based on the title. I expected a technical discussion on why the asset pipeline should be eliminated. Instead I got a lengthy article on how best to understand the culture of Ruby and its community.
It does seem, based on the evidence and arguments provided in this post, that MINASWAN doesn’t work as a way to understand Ruby, and that understanding it from the perspective of Japanese culture and its ideal of 和 makes more sense. It’s easy, as an American programmer, to forget that programming is a worldwide endeavor, and that different programmers are coming from lots of different cultures. The idea that Ruby’s Japanese community members objected to a potential Code of Conduct not because they disliked the conduct requirements but because they disliked the punishments for violating those requirements is an interesting point.
There’s a lot of America-centrism or Euro-centrism in programming (including in the fact that most programming languages use English reserved words or keywords, and the biggest programming communities online are in English (citation needed, there may be communities in other languages of which I’m unaware. The internet is a big place). I’m not sure how we deal with it or reduce it, or to what degree it is a substantive problem needing resolution. But it’s at least good to be reminded that it’s there.
I did not at all expect what this article turned out to be based on the title. I expected a technical discussion on why the asset pipeline should be eliminated. Instead I got a lengthy article on how best to understand the culture of Ruby and its community.
It does seem, based on the evidence and arguments provided in this post, that MINASWAN doesn’t work as a way to understand Ruby, and that understanding it from the perspective of Japanese culture and its ideal of 和 makes more sense. It’s easy, as an American programmer, to forget that programming is a worldwide endeavor, and that different programmers are coming from lots of different cultures. The idea that Ruby’s Japanese community members objected to a potential Code of Conduct not because they disliked the conduct requirements but because they disliked the punishments for violating those requirements is an interesting point.
There’s a lot of America-centrism or Euro-centrism in programming (including in the fact that most programming languages use English reserved words or keywords, and the biggest programming communities online are in English (citation needed, there may be communities in other languages of which I’m unaware. The internet is a big place). I’m not sure how we deal with it or reduce it, or to what degree it is a substantive problem needing resolution. But it’s at least good to be reminded that it’s there.