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."
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:2, Interesting)
Everything you say is very true, although I do cut him a break for saying up front that it was a rant. As long as you admit that, you free yourself from the strictest requirements of argumentation.
Personally I get hung up on the conflict between asserting superior education on the one hand, and then going on about fighting skills on the other. But he's not me, and I don't know what demons he has to exorcise (and I'm not among those criticized )),so more power to him.
We're all entitled to vent now and again, I suppose.
What I really want to know is why TechCrunch did a piece on this.
Addendum (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:CIA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:CIA? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself (Score:5, Interesting)
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 remarkable that people still do this (Score:2, Interesting)
Only 3 are really used for 95% of large apps (C, C++, Java)
Only 2 are used for bare metal apps and 95% of firmware (C, C++)
Only 2 are really used for 90% of scripting (Perl, shell)
Only 3 are used for 99% of web apps (Perl, PHP, JSP)
Notice Python and Ruby aren't in the list- they have a few fanboys and a few apps they can point to and claim people do use them, but in reality they make up less than 1% of apps in active development combined.
And notice there's a hell of a lot of overlap in there. The reality is, language doesn't matter. WHat does matter is availability of decent libraries. And for that, you're better off sticking with a major player. Unless your new language is as big a leap as procedural vs functional or OOP vs procedural, don't bother. The 100 new languages we get each year tend to be the same C++ style language with a few pieces of syntactic sugar on top.
Re:Ruby (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Guess It Is Back To Lighttpd + FastCGI (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:CIA? (Score:2, Interesting)
Jane Harman: "What can we do to go on the offensive? Are we doing enough to create false websites? And then try to track people, extemists, who try to go on those sites? Are we doing any of that? Create problems for them, if they go on these sites, they may not be authentic, and turn the internet into a less reliable source of information. Is there anything we're doing there?"
Ms Katz, attorney, Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk: "There are easy ways to manipulate popular websites and [myspace] profiles, and our govt agencies are doing that, moving certain videos up in the [google video and youtube] rankings, and lowering the ranking. We're also seeing a lot of sites that are deisgned to make fun of these sites, and bringing humor to it. We're seeing an awful lot of arabic humor designed to discredit Some of this. Some of it I suspect is being done through governmental agencies, some of it is done through talented teens who think its funny. A lot of this information is tracked and is being held by the social networks, youtube, mysapce, facebook, all of them collect the IP address of every comment and everything posted, and retain it for at least 3 months, to turn over to law enforcement. We can let our young people know they are being manipulated, and do more of that."
Don't threaten people on your company's web site (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, of course you could hurt him. Anyone could. Anyone could hurt anyone else. All it takes is a l;ack of caring, some motivation, some ether, and a car battery. No one sane brags about it. And no one with hopes of furthering their career says anything so juvenile on their own company website.
Now, what he said was that he would pay for the ring, and fight you legally. Knowing the two of you, I would put my money on him. No question. I would absolutely love to see the two of you face off in a ring. Whoever loses, the rest of us win.
That's actually given me an insight (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Re:So what (Score:5, Interesting)
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:It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself (Score:2, Interesting)
don't worry about it too much. After all, Lisp has
been savaged over and over, and even after the AI winter,
it's no deader than usual...
Always remember that popularity != success.
--The Gray Haired Luser Guy
I thought I was reading something on The Onion (Score:2, Interesting)
Assuming this isn't a parody, this guy has some really major issues that he needs to work on. I don't care how good someone thinks they are, with this kind of attitude and me being a hiring manager, his resume goes into the circular file.
Re:maybe I'm missing something (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's remarkable that people still do this (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, a bunch of companies are using C# now, but it still isn't anywhere near as big as Java or C++. I can't accurately judge it though, as I avoid windows like the plague. Besides, in 2 or 3 years MS will have there next new language of the month Javathon-- or whatever they'll call it.
Re:Zed Shaw: A master at self parody (Score:3, Interesting)
This brings up an interesting (to me) issue. When someone DOES post something on the internet which others would consider sufficient for instant-rejection, how does that individual reform (and subsequently recover)? I like the idea of being able to know that John Q Applicant was a complete asshole at Some Time in the Past, but what if he's genuinely been trying to improve? What if he was off his meds that day, or his jealous now-ex wrote it? What if he recognizes that it was a mistake, and has been working actively to be a better team player? Will anyone ever give them a chance?
Before the internet, one could conceivably recover from such a career mistake (if this was one): move to a new city/state/country/industry, and start over. Now, it's so easy to Fail people out of the job selection process (or any other one) that it seems like some people may be excessively punished for past behaviors.
Re:It's remarkable that people still do this (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Business Degree vs. Understanding Clients (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Guess It Is Back To Lighttpd + FastCGI (Score:3, Interesting)
I can longer consider using Mongrel unless there is independent review and/or this guy's committer access is revoked. Permanently. Since the only person who can revoke it is him, for Mongrel to be useful, someone needs to fork it right now from a 'last known good' version, into an independently controlled repository.
Failing that, my message to other people using Rails is that there is alternatives to Mongrel, so don't let not wanting to use Mongrel dissuade you using Rails.
He equates PHP programmers to Rails programmers (Score:1, Interesting)
This douchebag must a shitty programmer with that kind of equating.. Ill continue to make my money (more money than him) with PHP while he lives in a cardboard box trying to figure out what programming language he likes best?
Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:So what (Score:3, Interesting)
> 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.
I absolutely LOVE this attitude