Oppugn.us

There's nothing I love more than rhetoric. Rhetoric is so much better than logic because its entire purpose is to deceive and convince rather than to be provable. It's where we get statements like, "I know it's true because it feels true." When dealing with rhetoric everyone is hypocritical, inconsistent, illogical, and stupid. It's the real masters of rhetoric that can wrap this inevitability in enough words to convince you that what they say is true.

As much as programmers love to think they walk around life like the perfectly logical Colonel Sanders from the Matrix, they're really more like Robot SPD-13. Their insistence that they're so logical is so far from the truth that they end up just running around in circles never actually making any complete cohesive conclusions.

But, most importantly, this insistence on logical thought makes most programmers completely oblivious to the tricks of rhetoric and to any form of satire or subtext. To them any factual error, no matter how funny or hyperbolic, is inexcusable. Simply toss a few difficult to prove factual errors inside a rant about Steve Jobs being an evil super genius with a cat and they will focus on the error like a pink laser.

These are the same kind of guys who go see "Hot Tub Time Machine" and complain that the physics are totally wrong. "There's no way that time machine would work. The quantum dynamics of the force reduction drive would fail if it were immersed in water like that! (snort)" To them, the ridiculous and idiotic is not funny, it's simply an annoying fuzz filter on their incredibly boring, serious, and conservative lives that they probably absolutely hate.

If you read David Moore's rant he says that C programmers are socially isolated and that "people who understand users are now in the game". The implication is simply that if you code C you know nothing of users (even though most of the systems he uses are written in C or similar). C coders are the prototypical Robot SPD-13 circling the illogical user. Meanwhile, people who code PHP, Ruby, or Python are the real social butterflies. They move easily between social systems and really really care about the users.

His entire rant is a perfect demonstration of a sniped nerd laying dead on the floor. He blasts right past all the funny jokes, the subtext of Apple's stupidity, and goes right for one sort-of-error. Never mind that his argument is full of wonderful logic errors like your choice of programming language determines your level of Autism. What's most hilarious is he actually demonstrates his own rhetorical hypocrisy by completely ignoring the usability of a real Ruby on Rails on an OSX computer. He even carts out Ubuntu as a counter example when my own rant says Debian sucks too. Brilliant!

However, it's not just this one lonely man who was missing the entire point (which, incidentally is the whole fun of rants like that). As an experiment I hit up twitter and asked something simple: If installing Ruby on Rails is so easy, why is there the Hivelogic Instructions?

Again, this is more nerd sniping. The purpose of asking this question is to get all the various people coding Ruby on Rails to indirectly demonstrate two things:

1. There's a billion "recommended" ways to install that all fail in various ways.
2. None of them really give a shit about usability, just like us C long beards.

The number of ways I was told to install Ruby on Rails was staggering. I was told to "use mac ports don't install from source" even though macports uses source to install. I was told to use rvm, fink, gem, gentoo ext, homebrew, and the .pkg system. The sheer number of competing ways to simply get this software installed on a Mac is staggering, but what's more important is nobody thinks this is a problem. The same people who run around claiming that coding in Ruby means they really care about users could give a rat fuck if getting a decent install of the basics is a bewildering confusing mess.

Out of all the above, only one very nice person ever actually said he'd help and in a friendly caring way:

@wayneeseguin: @zedshaw If you or anyone you know has any issues with rvm I'm willing to help. I hang out in #rvm on freenode.

Thank you Wayne. I know Wayne personally and he is a very nice guy, so it makes sense he'd say this, but all those other so called "usability experts" who base their coder identity on the false correlation that "Ruby == Usability" failed miserably.

If you currently say that installing a real Ruby on Rails install (that means the most recent versions of everything, a database, and ImageMagick at a minimum) then you do not give a flying fuck about users. Plenty of users are complaining and the solution the Ruby community has is to just make even more confusion by creating yet another install method that works only for total long-beard-style bulletheads.

If you actually believe in usability, you will solve this problem once and for all or just admit it sucks and document the shit out of it like Hivelogic did.

Now, I actually could give a flying fuck if RoR is easy to install. I don't use it anymore, and only end up helping poor suckers who are told it's easy dig themselves out of a hole. To me writing rants like this are meant to entertain people and to sharpen my comedic writing skills. Half the fun is nerd sniping, including subtle subtexts that geeks miss, and having multiple levels of messages for different levels of intelligence.

The reality is, this is just fun. If you're reading oppugn.us like it's a fucking academic journal and demand that it not have any curse words or factual errors, then don't fucking read it. In fact, go put it in your /etc/hosts block right now. It's not for you.

But, I hope you tl;dr this article and keep coming back because holy crap you super serious people are the most fun part of this.