Rails Bigwig Rails on Rails Community 616
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."
Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:5, Insightful)
* 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.
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
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.
Oh shit look at his picture (Score:0, Insightful)
Apparently I'd Agree (Score:4, Insightful)
maybe I'm missing something (Score:1, Insightful)
Waste of time (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still no job? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Holy Cow! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Ruby (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Zed Shaw: A master at self parody (Score:5, Insightful)
Obligatory pot/kettle/black reference.
O....K.... I think that stands by itself.
But wait! There's more...
No, I believe you're doing that...right now...
And, based on the "beat your fucking ass" statements above, he'll be utilizing that software as a client at some point.
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Make the bad man stop (Score:2, Insightful)
Not trolling, just asking people to stop putting this kind of junk up front. It's a waste of everyone's time.
Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
My favorite part is when he doesn't get it.. (Score:3, Insightful)
What A Maroon! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Still no job? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Still no job? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:So what (Score:3, Insightful)
Shut up about martial arts. Martial arts is for pro bodyguards and nerds with inferiority complexes. Are you a pro bodyguard?
I'm sure it's a nice skill to know, but you're still going to lose a fight against anyone who's been in more than a halfahandful of real ones before, so don't get too cocky.
Rent a boxing ring? Jeeesus... what a bourgie way to threaten an ass-beating.
Re:Make the bad man stop (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I can't believe Slashdot published this "article" as news. It's just some guy having an ego-stroking rant.
Re:Zed's So Fucking Awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Zed Shaw: A master at self parody (Score:3, Insightful)
The lesson will prove even more invaluable whenever he is next looking for work (I predict this to be coming sooner than he expects). All it will take is one person at the company to throw his name into google and then look at the internet archive version of his site and voila: Instant rejection.
To be honest I feel a little sympathy for him.
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Make the bad man stop (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Go tolerate yourself. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Go tolerate yourself. (Score:2, Insightful)
Poor Zed looks like he's in the running for plain ol' Bipolar Disorder sans Genius though...
Re:Don't threaten people on your company's web sit (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Why feed the trolls? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Zed's So Fucking Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Why a beating? Why not a house fire? (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, as Dick Marcinko says, never give a sucker an even break.
Why ever expose yourself to retaliation of any kind?
It's far better to be an assassin than a brawler.
Of course, the martial arts do come in handy since shit happens.
But that's Ruby itself! (Score:2, Insightful)
I've lost count of the mod points I've lost here when I said exactly that about the Ruby community as a whole, not only the Rails bunch.
My pet rant against the Ruby guys is that they use multi-sillable (usually invented) words to describe their own favorite Ruby features, yet when one asks for a specific example where that feature would make a program better in any way, i.e. simpler, or more powerful, or more efficient, etc, they are unable to answer.
For the time, I think Zed Shaw made the right decision, go to Python. Ruby is Lisp with Perl syntax. The time you spend making up for this or that shortcoming Python has in relation to Ruby is amply compensated by the time you save with the simpler and more regular syntax. I had my share of generic "end" statements which you must match with several different ways to start a block when I did Fortran a quarter of a century ago.
Re:It's remarkable that people still do this (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ruby (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what I think makes a good coder? Somebody who can work with the way things are, not they way they think they should be.
I don't doubt there are some massive tools in the Ruby community, but there are some massive tools in life. What kind of person wastes so much of their energy and life fighting elements that they clearly can't change? It's a waste of a brain, and to wit, maybe not as brilliant a brain as it imagines itself to be.
What kind of thankless nitwit turns down a junior job at Google and bemoans giving cut rate deals to nobodies under the condition that the money is payed ASAP?
Eat some humble pie, kiddo, and get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to be awesome. Maybe, like
Cripes, I can hear folks tremble at the thought of him becoming more active in some of the other communities.
Re:Zed Shaw: A master at self parody (Score:3, Insightful)
Google is never going to let this guy live it down. I don't know if the new state of affairs will be more or less fair than the old one where people could avoid punishment by simply moving, but it will definitely be unfair in a very different way.
Round and round (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But that's Ruby itself! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:4, Insightful)
No doubt that the guy's brilliant, but I wouldn't want someone like him as my colleague/employee/business partner/etc.
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, It seems clear from Zed's work history (as he describes it anyway) that SOMEONE was able to get some good work out of him and keep his attitude in check at some point. So I guess it is possible, but you never know. He could have been more stable back then and has only more recently gone over the edge. His recent shenanigan's make him pretty high risk to even the most confident and competent manager. Zed's gone well beyond "abrasive" or "emotionally unstable." Even a great manager would be wise to take a pass on such a candidate. If you happen to find yourself with such a person on a team, sure, make the best of it. But to knowly take on such a explosive element is just not smart when it is (again, in my experience) the exception.
-matthew