Thoughts on Russian-speaking communities

I decided to not stay in Russian-speaking communities anymore. No matter what they are about: Clojure, Emacs, etc… When I see “…for Russian speakers” at the end of the title my hand moves to the cross-button by itself.

The main problem of Russian communities is they are all about trolling and rudeness. Every single person reckons himself as a Single Source Of Truth no matter what the facts say.

Even without opening a chat I can say what it is about. Definitely, to prove you are the most clever guy all around.

Recently, I’ve been chatting in Russian Clojure community in Telegram channel. That was awful. There were more then 100 people there, but only three of them (including me) work with Clojue for their daily work.

Nevertheless, the chat was boiling all the time. People argued on functional programming without any knowledge of that. There were trolls whose intentions were just to throw shit on fan.

I knew a person who was only 3 months with Clojure but argued so violently like he’s been 30 years with Lisps and functional programming. It applies to almost every member of discussion. On the first monitor, they have chat window and on the second there is a Wiki page or Stack-overflow where they convulsively try to find facts to support their opinion.

I looks so poorly.

And it’s this the same with other messagers and channels. No matter what is the subject of a community. In Russian-speaking group, it always ends up with a question who is cooler.

That behaviour shows all the bad traits human have. We try to pretend we know everything, be a leader (no matter in what way), hide our weaknesses and muffle misunderstanding of something.

What’s the point to read all that rubbish? Why do I need spend my time scrolling a feed full of arrogance?

I must confess Russian people are rude in general. This is particularly noticeable after you have told to non-Russian native speakers. Russian way of discussing tend to be aggressive and even impolite sometimes.

So what should you do? As for me, it’s better to join world-wide communities and channels in English. I’m sure you can easily find out Slack or Google Group channel for any language or technology you are interested in.

Staying in Russian communities only stops your development and limits your horizons.

If you disagree with me I highly recommend you to read that article written by Ivan Sagalaev, a famous Russian Python developer who moved to USA:

…у меня есть небольшое завещание заявление в адрес этого самого русскоязычного сообщества.

В современном мире локализация по признаку родного русского языка обрекает сообщество на вечную вторичность. Всё новое в программировании происходит на английском языке и будет появляться на русском с неизбежными задержкой и искажением. А собственные новые идеи, рождающиеся в сообществе, будут оставаться только в нём, лишённые возможности попасть на широкое обозрение.

Нужно осознать, что у русскоязычного сообщества должна быть другая функция. Вместо перевода всей доступной документации и построения иерархии локальных гуру, оно должно служить “песочницей” для тех программистов, которые только начинают учить английский и не чувствуют себя уверенными сразу включаться в мировое сообщество. Но вектор должен быть всегда туда.