Giles Bowkett Replaced by Mindless Fanboy

This post, and its title, is a response to Giles Bowkett's clairvoyant review of my Ruby book. In that review, he says:

• I am "soulless",
• my publisher was "really cool once", and that
• you "sure as hell don't want a copy of Flanagan's upcoming book".

The book is not out yet, and as far as I know no one has shown him one of the drafts circulated at ruby-conf. He bases his opinions on one comment I posted on Sam Ruby's blog.

The crux of Giles's argument is apparently that O'Reilly was disrespectful to the Ruby community because they're "publishing something by an author...who isn't even a significant part of the community".

Being called "soulless" (that's a fighting word, Giles) makes me angry, but this "in group" nonsense is what gets under my skin and is why I'm taking this fight to my blog. Had Giles been a participant in the ruby-core mailing list he would know that I've been an active member of that list for almost a year. He might also know that I have commit privileges and have made small but non-trivial contributions (such as implementing \u Unicode escapes in string literals) to the Ruby 1.9 codebase.

I've spent a year and a half learning and writing about Ruby. I've argued vocally for changes to the language and I've implemented changes to the language. Of course I'm part of the Ruby community. What Giles really means is that I'm not part of the Ruby club, of which Giles fancies himself a member. I have to say that this fanboy boosterism that pervades certain Ruby circles is a real turn off for newcomers to the language. The Ruby club has never managed to produce competent (English-language) documentation of the language, Giles. How can you blame O'Reilly for asking an experienced writer to do the job?

Giles writes:

Bear in mind this...comes from somebody who's programming and blogging at 11pm on a Friday

You need to learn, Giles, that insults posted on a blog at 11pm on a Friday can still be gracefully retracted...it would be soulful thing to do.

(I should make clear that I do not know Giles. The title of this post parallels the title of his post, but I do not really know if he is a mindless fanboy, or just acts like one sometimes.)