Many of the language communities I’ve been involved with have been dominated by behaviours such as:

- gatekeeping - elitism - subtle sexism - credentialism - (most frustratingly) a general sense that “our” community is somehow superior to others (people often hurl this nonsense toward PHP and JavaScript developers in particular).

I remember going to a Go talk where one of the founders of the language was speaking to a small group. An audience member who was an avid Go user asked a simple, innocent question about some shortcoming of the language. He copped a sarcastic and dismissive response from Pike, which of course then acted as the signal for everyone else to treat him the same way during the casual drinks and pizza after the session. I’ve seen this sort of thing time and time again both professionally and in the meetup / conference space.

On the contrary, the Ruby development community across three different Australian cities is dominated by people who have a solid baseline of emotional intelligence and worldly perspective. This filters through the community and creates an environment that I personally find to be far more welcoming and intellectually stimulating.

We are all noobs, at something. It's better to be kind and feel good about helping and sharing knowledge.

Luckily, Q&A sites like Stackoverflow, force the question to be answered.