More specifically, have you attended any regional Ruby conferences? It is almost certainly a community unto itself: those developers who take the time away from their jobs and families to attempt to better themselves by learning from others. The (Ruby) conference-going community is demonstrably better than at least two out of your three arguments.
As for the Pareto principle, it seems unfair to paint the "Ruby community" with such a broad brush while then going on to say the same of the OSS community at large. It's a universal problem. It should not have been raised in the context of your post.
Finally, you provided no constructive advice in your blog post. How was this post supposed to be helpful?
I for one am tired of the negativity.
This post, by providing only destructive criticism, ironically only serves to exacerbate the public image that some paint Rubyists with.
I did provide constructive advice. If you read the post thoroughly, you can see a call to improve our learning manners, stay away from hot trends, and even a simple pattern you can use in your day to day to compare technologies, or to understand better some debates (like threads-processes-reactors).
This is how Rails was marketed, by splitting people into camps: Us (cool, indie hackers) vs. Them (corporate stiffs). Fervent conflict was intentionally built into the Rails culture from the very start and complaining about it at this point seems slightly after the fact.
Which leads me to my next issue: the Pareto rule. This seems like a silly thing to be complaining about because it's also the reason that there are four revisions of the Rails book and countless other money-makers (books, confs, Peepcodes, etc).
I'm sure you can see why congratulating yourself may seem a little arrogant and perhaps give people the wrong impression of your "cancer-ridden" community.
Please, explain to me the difference between "following trends blindly" and "learning from older developers' experience"?
Because both of them look remarkably like cargo-culting appeals to authority.
Folks constantly rant about the reinvention of the wheel, but i think they're missing the point. Everyone talks about how wonderful it is that digital and web-based technologies allow for rapid prototyping and failing fast which in turn results in the ability to experiment.
And then they turn around and criticize people for experimenting accusing them of not learning from their elders or whatever. Learning is a process. You learn by doing. Even if you have to rediscover what other folks have discovered in the past.
But when you watch the bigger picture, with companies actually building software for clients that trust them, then choosing technology is a delicate, non-trivial matter. It's important, and I mean in actual dollars (or euros). There is where the expertise of older developers, people who have founded, sold or shut down profitable and unprofitable companies, who have worked in a gazilion of projects and made a lot of expensive mistakes, there is where that expertise comes to play. They can enlighten the sometimes childish, faction-like debates about technology that keep repeating themselves over and over. That can free us to think about new problems and new things, based on past experience. That's how science advances, and that's how software development advances too, in my opinion.