'Serving tea at the community kitchen at Bardon, October 1942' by Flickr user State Library of Queensland, Australia
Whilst browsing through some Ruby blogs via Delicious (after having just added mine), I happened upon a blog post entitled, “4 Wrong Ways and 1 Awesome Way to Choose a Language“. After having just written my own “How to choose a programming language” blog post I felt confident that this chap would cite “because it sounds sexy” as the awesome way.
Surprisingly, that was not his reason!
In fact, his reason for choosing his language of choice (which is Python, so clearly not chosen because it sounds sexy) is the community. When you’re working in a language with a good community, there is a good chance that whatever you want to do has already been done by someone else and is available for you to re-use. To be honest that is one of the reasons I picked Ruby. If you go with the current trendy language there is bound to be lots of support and resources out there for noobs like myself.
I actually left a comment on his blog mentioning my method of choosing a language and I suddenly got over 100 visits to this blog. Considering I had not had one single visitor before that, I was quite happy with the increase in traffic. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that no one agrees with my sentiment as I did not get a single comment on the post. It’s difficult enough being motivated to write a blog with 0 daily visitors, but when you do get an influx it would be nice if someone left a comment…
… even if only to ridicule me! :p
January 31, 2010 at 9:45 pm |
I feel your pain. Your point is excellent; that’s why I’m a Ruby fan too, the community is fantastic and has swerved sharply towards practices that guarantee Ruby will be a great success (TDD/BDD, much open sharing and reusability, heavy use of git to enhance the odds of every project benefiting from everything anybody can usefully contribute, etc). It’s hard getting recognized for good blog content, because this community has so many such brilliant and prolific authors, it’s like trying to stand out at MIT. Keep on plugging, and keep on making good points and articulating useful opinions, and eventually the people that benefit from your viewpoint will find you. It’s like standards; it’s hard because there are so many to choose from.
January 31, 2010 at 10:49 pm |
Thanks for making the first comment on my blog! I’ll keep plugging away!
February 1, 2010 at 2:06 am |
That´s just the reason I chose Ruby + Rails along with Cucumber and friends. I also have a blog about ruby newbie stuff and feel your pain about having almost no visitors. But.. Even if you don´t have enough visitors to keep you motivated, a blog is always a good way to reaffirm your recent toughts. Keep on walking!
February 1, 2010 at 12:13 pm |
So what’s the link to your blog? I might start add a blog roll of other newbie Ruby blogs. Like a self-help group!
February 2, 2010 at 12:05 am
http://rubynoobie.wordpress.com
A self-help group would be nice! Keep me informed!
Best of luck!
February 2, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Cool, thanks for sharing! Although I’m gonna say that your “ten years programming PHP and playing with some low-level C++” makes your Ruby learning experience a world away from mine. At least you already know you can code in some languages.
February 2, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Oh PHP? Not really something to brag about
I´m sure you can code! Everybody can! It just takes time, patience and creativity! If you need help you can find me at lucas . prim at gmail !
February 2, 2010 at 11:29 pm
Well, /eventually/ I hope to be able to code. However, I am starting from a point of knowing no code whatsoever! Eek! Hopefully I’ll get there with time. I am impatient though!
Isn’t Facebook made in PHP?
February 1, 2010 at 4:33 am |
For *real* traffic you might want to work on your outrageous, a la Giles Bowkett.
February 1, 2010 at 12:21 pm |
Haha I had to look him up in Google and I see the first post he has in the search results is ‘What Killed Smalltalk: My Balls’ http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/05/what-killed-smalltalk-my-balls.html
I’ll give him a read and draw inspiration from his style!
February 1, 2010 at 7:12 am |
Thanks for stopping by to visit, major! I’d love to be able to offer some great blogging tips on ho to get traffic and comments and so on, but when I wrote the 4 ways post it was, as yours, completely ignored by the world. It was only after the 3 rules post got frontpaged on Hacker News and later Reddit that someone submitted it to both sites, when it suddenly blossomed.
So, er, I guess my advice is get lucky?
Glad some visitors came your way though!
February 1, 2010 at 12:15 pm |
Yes quite satisfying now I’ve had a few visitors – and more importantly – comments!
Yes the holy grail for this blogger is to get someone else to submit a post to Hacker News or Reddit. I’ve submitted my own blog to HN once or twice, but it’s not quite the same!
February 1, 2010 at 8:18 am |
Commenting on other blogs is the usual way to get visitors and eventually commentarors to your blog. RubyCorner is fine, too
February 1, 2010 at 12:19 pm |
absolutely right – as shown by commenting on the coderoom blog above. Problem is finding the right ‘ecosystem’ of blogs – most of the Ruby blogs are at too high a level for me now to talk about code – I need to find the newbie blogs, such Lucas’ above.
Hopefully as I move more towards ‘doing’ rather than the current ‘learning’ stage I will have more to talk about.
February 2, 2010 at 3:56 pm |
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by noob2ninja: An alternative way to choose a programming language: http://bit.ly/b4ojYX…