I think it's the community. As an outsider watching a friend who is deeply involved with the Ruby ecosystem, I am in awe of the support they get even for small, artisanal-seeming projects from other devs in the community. I've seen them become a better a developer simply by showing up to conferences, talking to other maintainers and participating in the community.

I would not know, but I also do not think that an event xyz in one place at time, reflects all of a community either. So I could not tell you what the people there do; probably they want to socialize. I think creating and maintaining high quality project would be much more important but maybe that's just me. All the main drivers in ruby, have been written ages ago really - rails, _why the lucky stiff, even the old "Learn to program" tutorial from Chris Pine and so forth. That is not to say that no innovation has happened since then, of course, but it seems the peak days are really far, far behind now ...

Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline.

_why’s disappearance from the scene was 17 years ago at this point. I don’t think the Ruby community you’re talking about exists anymore.

Dude, what? Is it the MINASWAN acronym that's the problem or? If that's "trumpeting moral virtue", I can think of lots of programming languages that trumpet their moral virtue:

Let's check out the Rust Code of Conduct (https://rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct/):

"Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude."

"We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic."

Seems pretty morally virtuous, no?

How 'bout Gleam... Right on their home page (https://gleam.run):

"As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t."

Seems morally virtuous, too!

Also also: what does the "whytheluckystiff debacle" have to do with any of this?! Also also also: _why was pretty much the first prominent "dragger" of dhh. Man was an innovator.