People also need to be a little more careful about using the word "ghetto". It has a long history, from Jewish ghettos in Europe during World War II, to modern day black ghettos that persist in most big cities in the U.S.
Many people today still grow up in "The Ghetto," which is a place of geographic, economic, and political marginalization. Before you go talking about "Wii is a ghetto" or "Ruby is a ghetto" you should really understand something about what that means, and who you might be affecting with your words.
And even if you've decided that you want to throw the word around, use it fucking properly. A ghetto is not just something that "sucks". Ghettos are defined not just by being run-down, but by being isolated in some way. If you want to say something sucks, just say it sucks.
If you want to say something sucks, just say it sucks.
People also need to be a little more careful about using the word "sucks". It has a long history of homophobic connotations--originally it was used to denigrate people, generally men, by suggesting (in a derogatory sense) that they performed certain homosexual acts.
(When I was a kid, something that was really cheap and crappy was "ghetto"--"ghetto" being an adjective. Like if you had a really crappy car from the 80's, your car was ghetto. So maybe, even if the Ruby stdlib isn't a ghetto, the Ruby stdlib is still pretty ghetto in the adjective sense.)
You should be more careful about using the word "People" with its connotations of common and of the masses (as distinguished from the nobility)..etc. etc. ;-)
I know you're trolling, but I'll bite. No one is hurt if you use the word "people". People are hurt when you use the words "ghetto" and "sucks". That's the difference.
That's very true. Not just homophobic, but anti-woman. I try not to say it, but it's been very hard for me to get out of my vocabulary.
And I think "ghetto" as an adjective is even more offensive. It basically means "black". As in, "Ruby stdlib is crappy... like things black people use".
It's arguing something like: you can get some things done in PHP, but it's this walled-in, limiting environment that you'll never flourish in, unless you find a way to escape it and break out of the "PHP programmer" box. It even comes with a bit of a cultural/economic walling in also, with the connotations of the "PHP programmer" label.
With language/library environments there seems to at least be the potential for that sort of metaphorical isolation and limitation. I've heard people worry about whether there's a "Lisp ghetto" in that sense, especially post-1990s. That said, I agree that for this particular series of two posts, it doesn't seem to add much. It's something more like, "the Ruby stdlib is bad / no it isn't".
I am quite confidant that the "Ruby stdlib is a ghetto" post is titled after Zed Shaw's "Rails is a ghetto" post, which has come to sort of mean "i'm going to say something inflammatory and impolitic".
Why Zed titled his post as such was partially an accident (he didn't mean to publish it in the state it had been originally published, with that title). Why he originally titled it that, i dunno.
That's an old and always interesting argument, and I honor you for brining it up. However, the fact that English usage evolves is no excuse for going along with every bit of its evolution without asking yourself if the new usage is an improvement or not. It's our responsibility as writers to sift through the entire language and pick and choose the words and idioms that communicate our ideas well.
In this particular case, although plenty of people use "is a ghetto" to mean "sucks" rather than "is isolated," and although almost everyone uses "sucks" to mean "is poor" rather than "performs fellatio," I personally think that "is a ghetto" is a strong metaphor when used to imply a marginalized, isolated technology and is incredibly weak when used to imply something has fallen into disrepair. It really doesn't add anything insightful.
Which brings me to my personal metric for deciding how well a metaphor fits. Does it add some insight? If "is a ghetto" is synonymous with "sucks," I gain nothing form using it other than passing myself off as a hipster.
But when someone uses "is a ghetto" to describe something with an insular culture, I get an "aha!" moment as I think about the various implications, such as people trying to live their entire lives within the ghetto, or people learning to speak a crazy creole of their programming languages.
I think using "is a ghetto" in the social sense conveys extra insight or meaning, so I personally prefer it.
I will go further. Using it to merely suggest that something sucks is--well--gay.
Many people today still grow up in "The Ghetto," which is a place of geographic, economic, and political marginalization. Before you go talking about "Wii is a ghetto" or "Ruby is a ghetto" you should really understand something about what that means, and who you might be affecting with your words.
And even if you've decided that you want to throw the word around, use it fucking properly. A ghetto is not just something that "sucks". Ghettos are defined not just by being run-down, but by being isolated in some way. If you want to say something sucks, just say it sucks.