There’s a thread on reddit that asks “What is the biggest current problem in the Ruby community?” that I found to be very interesting. Among comments about performance, documentation, scientific and math libraries and an IDE was a bit of a flamewar about developing in ruby on windows.

The basic sides were “Windows programmers feel that they are entitled to having everything working on their system” and “The Ruby community is elitist”. I see the point to both sides. Yes, it sucks to develop on Windows and developers who work on gems in their spare time aren’t able to test in every single environment… but at the same time, there are a lot of crappy things that happen when trying to run Ruby code on Windows and no, sometimes switching to a different OS is really not an option.

I hope that as a developer on Windows who does want to help improve Ruby’s Windows support as well as be part of the “Ruby community” I’m not seen as feeling “entitled”.

Can’t we just all get along?