I keep wanting to look into ruby, but every time I hear about these personalities involved, It turns me off.

That's why my mom doesn't like rap music. Some of the people say curses and they talk about sex. It's also probably not worth visiting Texas because Bush lives there.

I'm pretty sure you can use Ruby without turning into a fanboy.

You can get as much out of the community as you want to, the language doesn't force you to adopt what the community believes is right.

With any language you have the freedom to write want you want to write, pick from the sources you feel are the best.

I don't think that's the issue. The issue is that if a community is represented by a few key figures that share traits that you do not enjoy or seek in a community (in this particular case; generating a lot of drama), it's very hard to overlook. It's like getting a bad first impression, only a bit more continuous.

I've been using ruby for about or over now not sure any longer 10 years. I ignore the general ruby community most of the time, you can too it isn't hard.

You can ignore the ruby community at large and still be productive. I don't see why (pun intended) if you don't use rails, you care about DHH, or Zed or whatever.

If you're unable to overlook _why as a fun programmer who happens to program ruby, I guess thats ok, but you really are missing out on an interesting language. I'd say the same thing about someone worrying about Guido and Python. Stretching that last analogy but I honestly don't know of any other programmer-artist that quite fits into the vein of _why. He is/was really unique.