Rails Bigwig Rails on Rails Community

Zed Shaw, creator of the popular Mongrel HTTP daemon / library, has decided it was high time to tear into the Ruby/Rails community for many different complaints that he has been collecting over the last few years. "Rails is a Ghetto" is Shaw's self-proclaimed exit strategy from the Rails community. "This is that rant. It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community. I don't want to be a 'Ruby guy' anymore, and will probably start getting into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months. I've got about three or four more projects in the works that will use all of those and not much Ruby planned. This rant is full of stories about companies and people who've either pissed in my cheerios somehow or screwed over friends. I can back all of them up from emails, IRC chat logs, or with witnesses. Nothing in here is a lie unless it's really obviously a lie through exaggeration, and there's a lot of my opinion as well."

So what

[by Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying RoR sucks for years. Where's my story?

Re:So what

[stoolpigeon (454276)]

apparently you didn't use enough profanity or brag enough about martial arts skills and willingness to fight anyone who disagrees with you. ramp that up and see what happens.

Re:So what

[ducomputergeek (595742)]

Chuck Norris came along and bent the ruby rails into loops!

Programming Huckabee-Pragmatic Programmer's Guide

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

Chuck Norris came along and bent the ruby rails into loops!

#!/usr/bin/huckabee

use CHUCK_NORRIS;

That's as far as I've gotten with my new language.

I've decided it will be statically typed. With Huckabee types, you know where everything stands.

Re:So what

[kalirion (728907)]

Is Uwe Boll making a RoR movie or something?

Mine is Bigger than Yours!

[fm6 (162816)]

Shut up about martial arts. Martial arts is for pro bodyguards and nerds with inferiority complexes. Are you a pro bodyguard?

So, you're saying we're all nerds with inferiority complexes? I have only thing to say to that: so what else is new?

As for pro bodyguards: if they're there to protect you, and not just to show off how important you are, then they carry Uzis.

Re:So what

[analogueblue (853280)]

You're right, but I will say the combination of practical martial arts and real world fights is better than just the latter. Muscle memory response and a deep familiarity with joints, nerves, strike points, and the like, helps out a lot against a bar brawler who just knows how to swing and duck.

I've worked club security in Boston and been in more than my share of altercations and I can attest that years of Ju-Jitsu absolutely make things easier, But I do agree that someone walking out of a normal dojo and getting into their first fight is almost certainly going to be in for a painful surprise.

Re:So what

[WarPresident (754535)]

Shut up about martial arts. Martial arts is for pro bodyguards and nerds with inferiority complexes. Are you a pro bodyguard?

Zed Shaw is tough. There is no chin beneath Zed Shaw's goatee, there is only Chuck Norris. If you can see Zed Shaw, he can see you. If you can't see Zed Shaw you may be only seconds away from death.

Tai Chi and Aikido as martial arts

[billstewart (78916)]

I actually do qi gong rather than tai chi, but they're pretty much the same thing. As a fighting technique, you can threaten the other guy with "Dude, if you don't back off, I'm going to breathe deeply and start moving reeeaallll sllllloooooowwwwww!" On the other hand, it's amazingly good old-guy exercise; I wish I'd discovered them when I was younger. Awareness of what your body is doing when you move can be really cool.

Tai chi does have a few techniques for fighting with sticks or knives, though I get the impression they're mainly there to give younger guys something to keep them interested so they can learn the less flashy parts. The real risk in fighting against an older tai-chi practitioner is that if you can't always tell whether he's a newbie or has been doing this stuff for 20 years, and can take all that slow controlled stuff and do it really fast. I suspect that if a bar brawl were to start happening around my teacher, either it would get distracted by a couple of confusing remarks, or the participants would find that some of them were sitting on the floor unharmed while the others were throwing punches that kept missing their targets.

My college theater professor's boyfriend taught aikido as well as fencing, and he gave us a day's lesson as part of our classes. It was kind of fun to throw a punch at him, and find myself on the floor without him having used much of any force. It doesn't take too much work to learn how to deflect attacks from unskilled fighters so you've got time to get out of their way; doing so without anybody else getting hurt requires more skill. Tai chi has some of that as well; it's especially useful for the kind of fights where you don't want to hurt the other person, like when your kids are mad and feel like thrashing at you.

Chuck Norris says his actual way of dealing with fights is to not get into them, and walk away if he has to. Just because you _can_ beat the other guy up doesn't mean you have to.

It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself

[DuranteAlighieri (1204994)]

I have been using Ruby since before Rails existed, and the whole Rails "community" has been highly suspicious to me from the start. Between outrageous claims and a far too religion-like mindset I just kept my distance waiting for the hype to go away again. It seemed to much like a marketing before technology movement (akin to say, the Java it derided so much (for good reason)).

You can see the difference between the old Ruby community and the Rails evangelists in many threads on the main Ruby mailing list throughout the last few years. Some of us already warned that in the end Rails may be a bad thing for Ruby back when the marketing blitz started, and now it seems this might hold true after all.

It's not a fate a very nice, expressive language made by an incredibly modest guy deserves. I hope more Ruby aficionados distance themselves clearly from the Rails hype.

Re:It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself

[by Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is about rails hype. This is the case of a prima donna who can't understand that his poisonous attitude is to blame for his unemployment, and not the community that gave him an identity as a useful asshole to have around. Meltdown. Move along, nothing to see here.

Apparently Zed Shaw got noticed...

[WebCowboy (196209)]

...because he graduated with honours from the Theo de Raadt School of Diplomacy.

Some predictions for 2008:

* Zed will fork and re-factor the framework, quietly releasing the far technically superior and more stable "OpenRails".
* Google will use OpenRails to successfully deploy the Beta release of its Next Big Thing. It handles thousands of requests per nanosecond and Google's share price spikes, though it doesn't account for any of Google's revenue.
* The PHP community declares "OpenRails is dead!"

Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[eldavojohn (898314)]

Before you spend the time reading this, let me point out that this isn't really technically oriented. I was hoping for some massive teardown of Ruby/Rails performance or load handling capabilities but ... yeah, didn't take away much from this other than this 'Zed' character can be quite abrasive.

Only a fucking tool bag piece of shit would:

* spend 10-20 minutes calling me names over IRC,
* not have the balls to say any of that to my face,
* say I'm a dick for wanting to use a different (established) publish/review model,
* and then demolish such an important file for a project,
* keeping everyone stumped and pissed for an hour,
* therefore proving me right.

This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college. BTW, this is true about Kevin as he's an English major or something stupid (and it shows).

Hats off to you Kevin, you fucking prick. I'm enjoying my vacation too.

Ok, this is the summation of his first point. He got into a verbal argument with someone on his team about how patches should be handled. Kevin thought people should be able to submit patches to his workspace while Zed vehemently did not.

People commonly have disagreements, work them out.

The fact that this (largely nontechnical) issue is his first point disheartens me and makes me wary of ever working with Zed no matter how brilliant he is. Perhaps this is another example of how non-personal communication (forums/IRC/IMs/e-mail) leads to heated debates over absolutely nothing. I would start to point out that Zed did call Kevin a 'mofo' first before Kevin called him a 'dick' but I would hesitate as name calling and the like is for children.

It's a wonder Zed gets anything done other than by himself to me.

As for his complaints about companies, I have to warn him that bad companies are everywhere ... just like bad people. What does any of this have to do with Ruby or Rails? Why are you so certain this is going to die? Because there are some idiots here and there trying to use it?

I hate to say this but after reading this first part of the rant, I think Zed is just as big (if not half) of the problem of the community being in shambles as any of his targets are.

Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[MyDixieWrecked (548719)]

yeah, I read 3/4 of this and all his complaints have been about people that have hired him to do projects and the fact that the Django crew is a lot nicer to talk to and are cool and smart guys.

All his complaints stem from him not getting along with people, not getting paid on time, the fact that the majority of the people jumping on rails aren't smart enough to properly implement things and that he really seems to be an abrasive character.

I mean, the first several paragraphs are nothing but him talking shit about kicking people in their respective mouths.

Aside from the fact that it's about rails, why is this on slashdot, exactly?

Business Degree vs. Understanding Clients

[billstewart (78916)]

Having a business degree is nice, but it doesn't usually teach you much about what real business environments are like; unfortunately the Real World is a better school for some kinds of things. As you say, clients aren't always good at paying on time. Some are consistently much worse than others - big businesses are often slow but usually will pay eventually, while small businesses sometimes just don't have the money, which they may or may not have known when they hired you, and maybe they're waiting for their clients to pay them so they can pay you, or maybe they're waiting for the customers who were supposed to be banging down the doors to hand them money once their really cool website was up and running, in which case you should have known going into the deal that you weren't going to get paid any time soon.

And clients aren't always realistic about what work they need done, or what it'll cost them. The old "$5 to turn the knob, $995 to know which knob to turn and how far" kind of story has pretty much always been true. Back when I was in the billable-hours game, it took a while to get used to the idea that my work might be worth $500K/year to a client (more if they only needed a day's work, negotiably a lot less for extended jobs), but the first time you tell somebody "Don't do X, that would be a Really Bad Idea, do Y instead", you've potentially saved them millions, and you don't feel at all bad charging them $250 an hour to do the grunt work on Y that their own employees could do for $50 if they knew how. (It was also interesting to have law firms as customers, since their attitude toward money was that computer consultants usually bill less per hour than associate lawyers, so go do what you need to do and don't waste our time supervising you. By contrast, retail companies are universally very price-sensitive about everything.)

Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[by Anonymous Coward]

There were some nuggets of information hidden amongst the general whining though.

Things like having complained to the rails team about its thread safety and having the rails team stubbornly insist that it wasn't possible to make it thread-safe up until the point where someone went off and wrote a better version that was thread-safe. Things like that, if it's true, don't inspire a whole lot of confidence in RoR, regardless of how tactless the critique is.

Yes, he's got the kind of personality flaws that are, unfortunately, all too common in the tech industry. But I don't think that alone means we should automatically dismiss everything he says.

Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[crush (19364)]

He's also completely right about the widespread ignorance of statistics [zedshaw.com] which more of should really be concerned about.

Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[misleb (129952)]

The fact that this (largely nontechnical) issue is his first point disheartens me and makes me wary of ever working with Zed no matter how brilliant he is.

My sentiments exactly. He blames Ruby on Rails for ruining his career. I wonder if maybe it was the notoriety Zed gained by doing Rails related work that led to his career decline. It let people see what a "character" he can be. I'd certainly never heard of him before getting into Rails. If you read the documentation for his projects you can see that it is rather... unprofessional. He laces just about everything he writes with profanity. Not nearly as bad as this rant, but not exactly professional either.

I almost feel bad for him that this senseless rant made it to Slashdot. Who's going to hire him now?

-matthew

Still no job?

[jamie (78724)]

He sounds like a real people person. I can't imagine why companies aren't jumping at the chance to hire this guy.

Re:Still no job?

[pudge (3605)]

Hm. He wrote:

You don't like what I've said, then write something in reply but fuck you if you think you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.

Hey Zed: I could hurt you.

Really bad.

I could hurt you so bad you would forget that you were even hurt. You would run screaming like a little girl to your happy place.

And your only recourse is to write your pathetic little rebuttals in your stupid little blog.

Re:Still no job?

[raju1kabir (251972)]

Too late, I already beat the shit out of Zed this morning. He was coming out of Starbucks carrying a Tazo Chai Crème and giggling about his new Hello Kitty cravat, and frankly, I just couldn't help myself. One open hand to the face, and he dropped like a bad packet hitting ipf, and then just sort of sat there on the pavement cringing and giggling. A couple girl scouts came by and kicked him in the teeth, then skipped off laughing as he threatened through a rain of tears to badmouth them in his blog.

Re:Still no job?

[B3ryllium (571199)]

Where can I download this new firewall technology? :)

Re:Still no job?

[pudge (3605)]

Couldn't what?

You are apparently confused. I already did it. He said, fuck you if you think you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me. So I did precisely that. I have completed my task, my victory is right there for all to see, and I've proven you wrong when you say I couldn't.

Why feed the trolls?

[Ayanami Rei (621112)]

This story is already flamebait enough as it is to add fuel to the fire in responding to ACs and trolls.
A metadiscussion of the story and the community is warranted and slashdot staffer's feelings about the subject are certainly interesting but this all seems childish...

If you're not doing it for the "lulz" then you should just stop.
If you are doing it for the "lulz" you need to work on your counter-trolling techniques. We expect a more seasoned ZING from the ones with the slashdot icon next to their names.

Re:Don't threaten people on your company's web sit

[John_Booty (149925)]

A threat would be saying that I *would*, rather than *could*, hurt him, which I absolutely did not do.

You don't understand why this is threatening? If I "casually" mentioned that I know where you live and that I used to be a firefighter and know how to get away with arson and that I think you're somebody whose family deserves to suffer, you wouldn't think that was threatening?

(Note: I am entirely non-violent, have never been a firefighter, do not know where you live, and have no idea how to commit arson)

I understand what you're saying - you said you could hurt him, not that you would. I understood that when I read your post without reading your clumsy explanations.

What I am saying is that communication between human beings is not precise like code. You did not say that you would hurt him, but the implication was clear. Obviously, I don't think you have any intention of hurting him. It just makes you look like a typically clueless robot-like nerd, that's all. Try that kind of crap in the real world and you get beaten up and/or slapped with restraining orders and/or worse.

What a poor image you project for your employer!

Re:Still no job?

[AuMatar (183847)]

What, you don't like profanity laced rants aimed at you and your employees, from someone who obviously believes his and only his opinion matters?

Based on the writing on his site, I wouldn't hire him for anything. Even if he's a god among programmers, I can hire someone who's 80% as good and causes fewer problems in the workplace, and likely come out ahead due to that.

Re:Still no job?

[Rakishi (759894)]

More companies are deathly confounded by "let's get along" managers who believe teamwork and tolerance are more important than actual good work.

No they value actual good work, the actual good work of the whole company not of one self-centered asshole. Life is about compromises and being able to deal with people different from you, if you can't deal with that reality then the problem is you not the rest of society.

Zed would have railed against the open secrets that allowed the tiger escape at the San Francisco zoo, and then he'd have been fired or reprimanded for not being politically and socially correct in his approach.

No if he worked for the zoo he'd have been fired for giving public statements when he did not have the authority to (which can and does cause all sorts of problems for a company).

Re:Go tolerate yourself.

[fm6 (162816)]

Albert Einstein actually managed to scuttle his initial post-graduate career because he let everybody know how smart he was. (He actually was as smart as he thought he was, but that didn't make anybody like him any better.) That's why he had to go work as a patent clerk. His best work was done after he'd grown up and gotten more sociable — and collaborative.

Perhaps the Turing machine and Alan's other mathematical achievements occurred in splendid isolation. But what about his work with Enigma? That was a huge project, and I doubt if it got done by him sitting around doing everything himself.

Ada Augusta, as I recall, never delivered any working systems. Wasn't her fault (the technology just wasn't ready for her), but that excludes her as any kind of teamwork benchmark.

Apparently I'd Agree

[aftk2 (556992)]

But for the absolute opposite reason: any community that would have this guy as a prominent member and/or mouthpiece is immature indeed.

Addendum

[aftk2 (556992)]

Gotta give credit where credit is due. This is pretty funny:

Notice how it took me a few seconds to reply. This one single statement basically means that we all got duped. The main Rails application that DHH created required restarting ~400 times/day. That's a production application that can't stay up for more than 4 minutes on average.

Let me put this into perspective for you: I've ran servers that needed to be restarted once in a year. They were written in PHP, Python, Java, C, C++, you name it. Hell, I've got this blog on a server I've restarted maybe 10-20 times the whole year.

Now, DHH tells me that he's got 400 restarts a mother fucking day. That's 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches. These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread (like a Ninja, Mentalguy is awesome).

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Repeat that to yourself. "He couldn't keep his own servers running for longer than 4 minutes on average."

Assuming his statements are true (which we may never know) he basically duped us all.

Whose chopper is this?

[reverseengineer (580922)]

It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community.

Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.

Slow news day?

[shawnmchorse (442605)]

I actually started to read TFA, but discovered that it appears to just be a bunch of high school drama. Or something.

Holy Cow!

[RAMMS+EIN (578166)]

Holy cow! I started reading TFA with the idea that there would be some good points in there, but never got to them. What a load of verbal abuse! Excuse me, but I don't fancy reading through that.

I understand that things have really hurt this guy and made him angry, but I don't think this is the way to go about improving things. It may be a good way for him to vent his frustration, but I would say that if you want people to take you seriously, it's better to write down your criticism in a civil manner, with examples of what you are criticizing and, for even better results, suggestions for how to improve things.

A long rant that slings abuse at everything and everyone is bound to just hurt people, and that's rarely if ever a Good Thing. As for me, I won't be reading the article any further, so that's _one_ initially interested reader he has lost. And I'm sure I'm not alone.

Zed Shaw: A master at self parody

[greg_barton (5551)]

I'd never heard of Zed Shaw before this story, but he will now be who I think of when the words "self" and "parody" are juxtaposed in my mind. To wit:

This means that thanks to Larry Flynt I can stab them in the ear verbally, insult them, question their sexual orientation, and say anything that's true and they just have to take it. Their only recourse is to write their pathetic little rebuttals in their stupid little blogs.

Obligatory pot/kettle/black reference.

I'll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I'll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally.

O....K.... I think that stands by itself.

But wait! There's more...

I've been thinking this over ever since I realized that Mongrel and Rails more or less killed my career.

No, I believe you're doing that...right now...

Before Mongrel I was building kick ass software for the NYC Dept. of Correction with a tiny team.

And, based on the "beat your fucking ass" statements above, he'll be utilizing that software as a client at some point.

After Mongrel I couldn't get a gang of monkeys to rape me, so forget any jobs.

Seriously, based on reading only a portion of his post, I wouldn't hire this man even if he was a coding god. I don't think his woes are due to his previous co-workers. Textbook example of a serious attitude problem.

Zed's So Fucking Awesome

[Serious Callers Only (1022605)]

I'll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I'll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally. Remember that I've studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I'm old, and I don't give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine. You don't like what I've said, then write something in reply but fuck you if you think you're gonna talk to me like you can hurt me.

Over and over again I'd run into these morons who would offer me tiny jobs, no jobs, insult my intelligence, treat me like all I can do is code, and when I didn't fit that mold or wanted to charge them for the privilege they'd cheat me or laugh at me.

Google was a total riot. They offered me a job twice. I went with it, and they never responded. Probably because the job they were offering me--someone who's been coding for 21 years, 15 professionally--was as a junior system administrator. What the hell does a junior sysadmin do at google? That's probably like mopping the floor at a glory hole in Queens. I told them to review my resume and offer me a real position.

Perhaps Google read a few paragraphs of Zed's So Fucking Awesome and thought better of asking him to do anything at all. I feel sorry for this guy now because this one post will do more to ruin his career than any minor tantrum in front of a few people (a few of which he describes here). I hear dreamhost [dreamhost.com] is hiring though; his weblog reminds me of theirs.

Re:Zed's So Fucking Awesome

[Unoti (731964)]

Definitely. What's the big problem with being a Junior Sysadmin at Google? A true hotshot should be able to move up the hierarchy quickly. Also, earlier in the rant he complains about needing money very badly, and having trouble with clients paying reliably. Sounds like a regular day job is in order, and certainly junior sysadmin at Google is a better idea than cleaning up a glory hole in Queens. I respect the work that Zed's done, and have been impressed with his approaches in the past, but jeez, what a primadonna.

Re:Zed's So Fucking Awesome

[fm6 (162816)]

A true hotshot should be able to move up the hierarchy quickly.

I've had some interaction with Google, and I get the impression that they have a lot of hotshots and almost no hierarchy. So unless you're hired as an Official Google Genius, you're never going to become one. Really, the only way to do it is to graduate from a good school and/or have a graduate degree and/or do some original computer science that's really impressive. Self-trained "practical" programmers need not apply.

Wow

[andawyr (212118)]

That is truly one bitter individual.

I mean, there's such a thing as burning bridges, but he's taken it to the next level. I know for a fact that if I ever received a resume from such an individual, it would go straight into the trash.

As far as I'm concerned, interpersonal skills count for a lot - even if your a genius, in a real environment you'll have to function as part of a team. This guy, well, it seems that he has real difficulties in a team environment. Sure, he may have worked with some individuals that were not up to his standards (would anyone be?), but to say what he said...it's too much.

Good riddance to him.

What A Maroon!

[MightyMartian (840721)]

My favorite part is where he brags about having a business degree, except that prior to that he admitted to being homeless for a big chunk of the year.

This is a classic case of a loser blaming everyone else for his problems. If this idiot didn't know that the world is populated by shitty little startups with no money and big ol' mean corporations that don't pay invoices for 6 weeks then he definitely got into the wrong business.

Blaming a coding environment for your financial woes is like blaming your car because the subway runs late.

Guess It Is Back To Lighttpd + FastCGI

[aldheorte (162967)]

Interestingly, the Rails community had started to 'normalize' on a framework of Apache + Mongrel in the last year or so. Some of this may have had to do with comments by the author of this article and Mongrel that lighttpd sucked (apparently because the lighttpd developers were not keeping modproxy up to date enough for him, which may or not be true - remember that Mongrel only works well to the extent that the web server proxy implementation works well as well).

Prior to this, lighttpd and fastcgi had been favored. With that guy's attitude, I suspect that Mongrel is quickly going to fall out of favor. Hell, with that outburst, I think people should be rightly concerned about using and updating Mongrel as a matter of due diligence.

The major point here is that alternatives exist and we of the lighttpd and fastcgi persuasion would like more fellows to build brain share. We promise not to swear at you quite as much.

That's actually given me an insight

[jimicus (737525)]

I'm beginning to get an inkling of why you don't tend to see such an elitist "I'm better than you!" approach to communication on Windows-based forums, mailing lists and IRC channels - and I think Zed has just inadvertantly explained it beautifully.

In closed source software, very few have access to source code and those that do aren't at liberty to discuss it in any detail. We only have access to the same help files, knowledge bases and forums, which are by and large a lot more human readable than several thousand lines of C code. But at the same time, they're a lot less informative. In solving a particular problem, everyone's trying to find the proverbial black cat in a coal cellar. It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times, because next week it could be us asking the questions.

In Open Source, everyone has access to and can discuss the source code all they like - and there is an elite of people who have the time and expertise to be able to understand it in some detail. The elite don't need to worry so much about pissing people off because they have the ability to read the source code and understand what is going on. And so it seems much more often you find someone who tends to come across as either very outspoken (at best) or downright malicious (at worst).

In related news...

[dwalsh (87765)]

2/1/2007

Today, Theo de Raadt declared that henceforth he would "be nice to people", because "not even the mightiest asshole gods on Mount Asshole can top the the egomaniacal rantings of this Rails douchebag who no-one has ever heard of".

By comparing the significance of their work versus there public tactfulness, Linus Torvalds has now been awarded the Nobel Prize for niceness, and the American Marriage Council has awarded Hans Reiser 'Husband Of The Year'.

Ouch.

[MenTaLguY (5483)]

I think it's better if I don't comment on the rant itself. I think I can offer a little bit of general background information, though.

It's important to note that there is a distinction between the "classic" Ruby community (led by Matz), and the Rails community (led by DHH). Since Rails is built atop Ruby, Rails jobs are also Ruby jobs, but the two communities still have very different cultures.

Mongrel is a Ruby web application container mostly written in Ruby, except for the HTTP parser is written in C/Ragel. It has very good performance, and the Ragel state machine definition was derived directly from the BNF in the HTTP specification, so it also has extremely strict standards compliance. It became the most popular web application container for Rails. Since most of Mongrel is written in Ruby and most of the rest is in Ragel, we eventually got a JRuby/Java version of it too. These days Glassfish is becoming an increasingly popular substitute for Mongrel on JRuby, however.

fastthread is a Ruby library which "hot-fixes" the Ruby standard library to provide optimized versions of its thread synchronization primitives. It was mainly intended to improve performance, but as a side-effect it also worked around some long-standing bugs in the core Ruby classes which resulted in memory leaks and interpreter crashes under high load. Mongrel ended up requiring fastthread as a dependency because it was the only way to stably run a high-throughput application using the synchronization primitives on the 1.8 interpreter. fastthread is unnecessary on other Ruby implementations like Ruby 1.9 and JRuby.

Round and round

[localman (111171)]

I don't want to be a 'Ruby guy' anymore

I'm sorry, but I feel the same thing with every new programming language and/or paradigm. It's just a bunch of busy work to learn a new syntax, find all the best-of-breed libraries, and work around the unforeseen limitations. In the end, you're not more than a negligible amount better than before, and you've wasted a year of your life.

Are there still people out there who believe in the silver bullet? I mean, I understand there are always new people coming into the practice, but I believe we can mature as a group. Nobody advocates GOTO any more, maybe we can stop advocating the endless language churn? It seems like an enormous waste of time.

I mean, follow your bliss, if you've got great ideas, implement them. I've written redundant libraries because I wanted to see how it would be done. Explore, enjoy. But understand that since LISP we've been able to do whatever we wanted to do, so it's all just hand waving at this point.

More power to Ruby. Rails. Python. Whatever. I'm still hacking Perl at the moment and I don't see any compelling reason to switch. I can do what I need to do. I'm sure that your language of choice cuts the mustard too. When the next 10 Super Languages Of The Future (tm) come out in the next decade, I'll enjoy reading about them and watching as they run into their own particular issues because...

Effective Software Design Is Hard.

Cheers.

Re:Ruby

[nuzak (959558)]

Apparently so are some of its former developers.

Clever title, but "Pissy Foul-Mouthed Drama Queen Makes Histrionic Exit from Rails" would have been more accurate. I don't much care for rails either, but I do hope any other project he hops onto doesn't look to him for their public face.

Re:Ruby

[Watts Martin (3616)]

Clever title, but "Pissy Foul-Mouthed Drama Queen Makes Histrionic Exit from Rails" would have been more accurate.

While I (sort of) hate to say it, this shouldn't be a real surprise to anyone who's read Zed Shaw's blog and even Mongrel's official web site... well, we'll just say that the fellow always came across to me as someone who was more interested in railing than Rails, if you get my drift.

I like Mongrel -- I use it to run my Instiki web site -- and think Shaw's an undeniably good programmer. But there's a certain kind of personality in a (fortunately small) subset of tech-heads, that assumes that the sheer brilliance they bring to their work is all that matters. You'd better listen to them because they're fucking brilliant and you're not them and don't you fucking forget it. I have more than one acquaintance who exhibits this attitude -- and who has a whole lot of trouble finding and keeping work. Hmm.

Oddly, I'm exploring Python and Django now after my own long detour through Rails, without quite accomplishing anything on my own part other than cementing an exasperation with PHP (version 4 in particular). Running that Instiki instance is part of what's lessened the appeal of Rails. I don't know how much of that can be blamed on Instiki itself, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "not all of it." But I digress.

Re:CIA?

[LWATCDR (28044)]

Sure there is proof. Facebook's main function is to get something on everybody. You are posting your life on Facebook and all your friends.
Actually there seems to be some very tenuous connections as far as venture capital for Facebook and the CIA. I think it is more Tinfoil hat stuff than real but I could be wrong.
Social networking sites could be of interest to law enforcement agencies. If someone has committed a crime or is on the run they will often turn to friends or friends of friends for help. If the police are looking for anyone the first thing they will do is contact the person friends, family, and co-workers. Social networking sites soft of put them all out there for the world to see. The scary thing is that they tend to be some pretty distant links on your friends links.
On guy that I added as a friend I had one class in eleventh grade with. I haven't seen him since but he found me so I added him.
So I just kind of doubt that the CIA is really backing Facebook but I don't doubt that they have an interest in it.

Re:Make the bad man stop

[Henriok (6762)]

Maybe I'm confused. I thought the little motto up top said "News for Nerds. Stuff that MATTERS." Who cares about this?

I care. Not so much in the context of Rails, Ruby or Mongrel, but in the context of being an employee in the IT business. Working in teams, working with excentric individuals, stupid bosses, geniuses, hacks, nice but incompetent, obnoxious but blazingly creative, hard working average joes, brilliant slackers. All this is what we all meet every day. It's great to hear these stories, since we all can relate to them, pehaps come to terms with our own failings and forgive the failings in others.

I feel for Zed, I really do. It seems to me that he's one guy who've been screwed one too many times, and breaking down is just too common under such circumstances. People skills, yeah. He might not have them, but reading a story like this makes me more proficient in that department. So.. I think it matters. It matters a lot. To me. To us all.

Re:maybe I'm missing something

[MenTaLguY (5483)]

While I think Rails has some problems, it's important to draw a distinction between bugs in the Ruby standard library/interpreter and bugs in Rails. If it was just a Rails issue the hotfix for Ruby 1.8 (fastthread) wouldn't have resolved things. Note that other Ruby implementations (e.g. 1.9, JRuby) don't manifest the same issue and a fastthread equivalent is not required.

Re:It's remarkable that people still do this

[Sweetshark (696449)]

If it had 10% of the marketshare I'd be shocked- in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs.

Since you are doing profesional programming so long, you have to have seen a trac installation, if you have not been living under a stone. So what was the other app? Propably anything from google with scripting in it, because at google, they standardizing on C/C++, Java and Python. Or did you play Civ IV, where the AI is written in Python? Or did you use bzr or git, the scm of the linux kernel? Dia, gnumeric, or nmap? Xfce or Gnome? Or gentoo linux?
Seven years of professional programming? What did you do? COBOL coding for a bank?
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm/ [tiobe.com]

As for C# -- dont be so arrogant. Microsoft does a lot of stuff wrong. But Sharepoint is a killer app - although a buttugly one. And while hubris reigns about the failures of Microsoft elsewhere, they are establishing a monopoly there thats even stronger and meaner that Windows and Office ever were.