Zed Shaw - Ruby has dodged a bullet

Ruby
1

Much like watching a car accident in slow motion, I could scarcely
believe my eyes when reading Zed S.'s screed on Ruby & Rails on his
blog [1].

I know I shouldn’t give an attention whore that which he so
desperately seeks, but I can’t help myself. I’m the guy down on the
street shouting for the idiot on the ledge to jump. Not only has he
jumped, but he has promised “future installments” to complete the
tragedy. I cannot look away; I don’t want to look away.

Any how… I think Kevin C. labeled him correctly. See Zed’s rant
for the background on this reference.

If I was in a position to do so, I am sorely tempted to hire him just
to fire him right away. :slight_smile:

Thankfully the mongrel project is in sane hands. He did a wonderful
job developing mongrel for which he deserves full credit. His rant and
apparent abandonment of Ruby is just peculiar in light of his past
contributions.

A community with a significant reputation for helping novices and
welcoming newbies doesn’t have a lot of room for cranks. I hope Zed is
welcomed by the community(ies) focused on his next language choice;
based on his personality traits, I’d say he should join the LISP
community ASAP. Even they might find him to be a bit much.

Happy New Year! Happy New Rants!

[1] http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html

2

Chuck R. wrote:

Any how… I think Kevin C. labeled him correctly. See Zed’s rant for
A community with a significant reputation for helping novices and
welcoming newbies doesn’t have a lot of room for cranks. I hope Zed is
welcomed by the community(ies) focused on his next language choice;
based on his personality traits, I’d say he should join the LISP
community ASAP. Even they might find him to be a bit much.

Happy New Year! Happy New Rants!

[1] http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html

Well … actually he has joined another community, but not Lisp He’s now
a Factor devotee. Which reminds me – some time I need to ask him why
Factor and not ANS Forth. :slight_smile:

I’ll go read his blog.

3

Jeremy McAnally wrote:

Regardless of how I feel about Zed, given his attitude in this rant
he’ll fit in well with Factor’s creator.

–Jeremy

On Dec 31, 2007 10:36 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:

[snip]

Well … actually he has joined another community, but not Lisp He’s now
a Factor devotee. Which reminds me – some time I need to ask him why
Factor and not ANS Forth. :slight_smile:

I’ll go read his blog.

Well … I went and read it. I think it’s rather sad, actually, because
stuff like that lives forever on the web.

4

Regardless of how I feel about Zed, given his attitude in this rant
he’ll fit in well with Factor’s creator.

–Jeremy

On Dec 31, 2007 10:36 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected]
wrote:

away; I don’t want to look away.
contributions.

Well … actually he has joined another community, but not Lisp He’s now
a Factor devotee. Which reminds me – some time I need to ask him why
Factor and not ANS Forth. :slight_smile:

I’ll go read his blog.

–
http://www.jeremymcanally.com/

My books:
Ruby in Practice

My free Ruby e-book

My blogs:

http://www.rubyinpractice.com/

5

James B. wrote:

Well, since I got here late, I still like the Ruby community. :slight_smile: And I
think that’s exactly the problem with Zed’s rant … it seems to me that
he has placed code above relationships.

6

Chuck R. wrote:

Much like watching a car accident in slow motion, I could scarcely
believe my eyes when reading Zed S.'s screed on Ruby & Rails on his
blog [1].

I liked the Ruby community better when it placed more emphasis on code
and less on personalities.

–
James B.

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, but the illusion
of knowledge.”

  • D. Boorstin
7

On 1 ene, 00:13, Chuck R. [email protected] wrote:

Much like watching a car accident in slow motion, I could scarcely
believe my eyes when reading Zed S.'s screed on Ruby & Rails on his
blog [1].

Zed’s personal arguments but I I had to agree on some of them.

I know I shouldn’t give an attention whore that which he so
desperately seeks, but I can’t help myself. I’m the guy down on the
street shouting for the idiot on the ledge to jump. Not only has he
jumped, but he has promised “future installments” to complete the
tragedy. I cannot look away; I don’t want to look away.

Let me ask you, you enjoy watching the guy about to jump, desperately
waiting he just loose the only thing is holding him with life, or you
try to convince him that life have bad and good things and he
shouldn’t jump just because something bad happened to him?

Any how… I think Kevin C. labeled him correctly. See Zed’s rant
for the background on this reference.

Mmm, I wouldn’t say “KC was correct”, that makes you put a label on
someone you don’t know, someone who didn’t spoke directly to you or
you didn’t meet, that is worse than using bad words when speaking
about someone isn’t present at that time.

If I was in a position to do so, I am sorely tempted to hire him just
to fire him right away. :slight_smile:

I don’t find that funny, honestly.

Thankfully the mongrel project is in sane hands. He did a wonderful
job developing mongrel for which he deserves full credit. His rant and
apparent abandonment of Ruby is just peculiar in light of his past
contributions.

Yes, he did and I can say that I miss some of the clear guidance he
provided to the project:

flight low, keep it small, if ain’t broke don’t fix it.

A community with a significant reputation for helping novices and
welcoming newbies doesn’t have a lot of room for cranks. I hope Zed is
welcomed by the community(ies) focused on his next language choice;
based on his personality traits, I’d say he should join the LISP
community ASAP. Even they might find him to be a bit much.

Actually, Amy Joy (from Slash7) wrote an excellent article about Help
Vampires [1] a long time ago, a long time before Rails and Mongrel
became the “new defacto” or Ruby became “the next big thing”.

I’ve encountered a lot of times questions asked all-over-again, users
that din’t research (hey, they even didn’t hit search button) – and
google make that so easy to happen.

Also, that happens with some “consultant” companies too, they don’t
hire knowledge, they hire fingers, the more the merrier, the less they
pay and the faster you can type, the better (yes, no matter what you
write).

I can’t speak of TW, but I know some of them, mostly unrealted to Ruby
or Rails.

I don’t have MBA or BS degrees, I didn’t finshed my engineering career
neither, I just have a bachelor title, nothing more.

I’ve been with ruby since 2001, way before Rails, way before it worked
right under Windows (yeah, I can do Linux and *nix too).

I was also on Python, and Lua, and had more success embedding the
later than Ruby.

Zed is a great human being, no matter if his language/framework choice
isn’t shared with you. I’ll like to quote something Matz. showed in
his RubyConf presentation:

Python: One True Way
Ruby: Diversity.

Now replace Python with Rails. Diversity is what let people with
different thoughts can live along, if you don’t agree with Zed, you
can show your point of view, like he did, and others will agree with
you, or not.

But please, don’t put labels to others that you don’t know, and if you
know Zed, word it correctly.

“I know Zed and he is a complete moron” – which wouldn’t be polite,
but is your personal oppinion about him.

Like Zed, we all have some differences with other users in the
community. Zed didn’t stab all the members of it, nor Ruby nor Rails,
but lot of folks must agree that Rails is becoming the next Java.

I start hearing the ‘enterprisy’ word too much lately. Like Zed and
guess a bunch of folks started with Ruby for the joy of programming,
not to make a few bucks with it.

Abuse of our love for it (from consultants, contractors or peers)
stress us and remove the joy of even enter in #ruby-lang to hang out a
bit.

So please, if you have something different (and constructive) to say
about this, go ahead, write a personal post like Zed did I’ll love to
share also my comments.

Have a nice Year! (2008 just started!)

[1] http://slash7.com/pages/vampires

8

"Like Zed, we all have some differences with other users in the
"community. Zed didn’t stab all the members of it, nor Ruby nor Rails,
“but lot of folks must agree that Rails is becoming the next Java.”

Well he wrote:

‘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’

And to me this sounds as if he hates Ruby as language, but without
giving any concrete evidence what he dislikes about ruby as language.

9

On Jan 1, 2008 7:36 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected]
wrote:

Well … actually he has joined another community, but not Lisp He’s now
a Factor devotee. Which reminds me – some time I need to ask him why
Factor and not ANS Forth. :slight_smile:

Dunno about Zed, but I made the same decision recently. My reasoning
was (i) nascent languages and language communities are fun (ii) the
stdlib and emphasis on real world coding look really attractive. It
looks like it might become the open source equivalent of rebol, which
looked nice but which ran into my reluctance to invest in a
closed-source language.

martin

10

Marc H. wrote:

‘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’

And to me this sounds as if he hates Ruby as language, but without
giving any concrete evidence what he dislikes about ruby as language.

Well, just about the whole blog is about Rails, but:
http://rubyisnotrails.com/

Some time ago, I was evaluating Zed’s “Profligacy” as a framework for
Swing (in JRuby). However, although his technical solution was quite ok,
I decided not to use it in my project based on his extremely hostile
tone towards fellow programmers on the web pages. (My impression was
that if I would get into trouble along the way, I would probably be
stuck forever.) And now with this new blog of his, the counts for words
like “idiot”, “dumb”, “moron”, etc just confirms that fact.

If Ruby was very much designed to make the programmer feel good (which I
personally feel to be very much the case, my eyes opened by Giles’
excellent blog post at
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-i-program-in-ruby-and-maybe-why-you.html),
Zed clearly needs 2 new languages (one for the computer world one for
the real world). IMHO.

Happy New Year to Matz and the whole Ruby community! Thanks for a great
language!

Best regards,

Jari W.

11

Oh give Zed a break. He’s an excellent programmer. He’s not gentle or
ginger with words and never has been. Some of that his also his sense
of humor and exaggeration. BUT, I can totally understand where he’s
coming from dealing with web developers and web development
companies. I believe he’s aiming to much of that anger at Rails
because of the people he’s dealt with.
Among web developers, there are lots of them with big egos, self
importance, going only for the gold with no pride in what they’re
building or real confidence in coding. Many web dev companies and
their leaders just have absolutely zero sense of loyalty or ethics
and will screw people at the drop of a hat AFTER making promises and
schedules they could never keep.
And the half-baked, hair-brain ideas for web sites? Oh yeah, there
are lots of those Rails projects. There are lots with PHP too.

Zed is not wrong, except to blame Ruby or Rails for the problem. What
he says about Rails being a big “lie”, well there may be some truth
to that… But clearly Zed was able to build a heck of a good thing
with Mongrel…so he does know a thing or two about that!

I can understand the allure of the Python community for him. Python
web frameworks do tend to be used by companies and groups that are
very clear about why they’re using a particular technology and pretty
well-grounded in reality. We all know that Rails’ hype sometimes can
be annoying.

Sounds like Zed just wants to do interesting programming and get
rewarded for it, not just well paid, but treated like a human being
without junior high school drama. Seems reasonable, but often
difficult to achieve.

Personally, I think Zed is a funny guy. I think I get his humor. But
I also hope he continues to develop good stuff in Ruby and realizes
that it is largely just the bad side of the culture of the web
development world that got to him.

Zed, get away from the web sites, do something without web stuff!

12

If I correctly understand his rant, Zed’s problem is that he now has
trouble
finding work (to make the point, he uses a picturesque reference to
sexual
behavior in monkeys). And for this he blames his involvement in the Ruby
community.

I’d say he makes a very good point. As a result of his well-regarded
work on
Mongrel, his thoughts and opinions on sundry subjects have become widely
circulated.

And since his thoughts and opinions often evince qualities that are not
universally desirable in employees, his Ruby-derived fame (together with
Google) has given everyone a permanently-accessible list of very good
reasons not to hire him.

I can understand the fascination of watching an otherwise-intelligent
person
commit career-suicide by way of an embarrassing and tasteless rant. But
the
Ruby community will survive being kissed off by Zed S…

13

On Jan 1, 2008 5:00 PM, Francis C. [email protected]
wrote:

universally desirable in employees, his Ruby-derived fame (together with
Google) has given everyone a permanently-accessible list of very good
reasons not to hire him.
Short and pittyless: I hate the arrogancy (but very often there are
reasons for such things) of the guy, but would always consider
coperation with him. I believe that he has written stupid things,
ok, who has never? Do not even look at me but if you are I can prove
the contrary easily . . .
It is sad that he left the community and it is sad that he has
problems of finding a job, can we afford to lose such brilliant a
mind? I do not believe so, but our society does, what could one add?
Good luck Zed…

I can understand the fascination of watching an otherwise-intelligent person
commit career-suicide by way of an embarrassing and tasteless rant. But the
Ruby community will survive being kissed off by Zed S…
I ca

–

http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,
it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Schopenhauer (attr.)

14

Sounds like Zed just wants to do interesting programming and get
rewarded for it, not just well paid, but treated like a human being
without junior high school drama. Seems reasonable, but often
difficult to achieve.

I’m sure that’s really hard for him, especially when someone yells
demeaning slurs at him and writes angsty rants against him like a
junior high kid in the heat of puberty.

Oh wait.

–Jeremy

–
http://www.jeremymcanally.com/

My books:
Ruby in Practice

My free Ruby e-book

My blogs:

http://www.rubyinpractice.com/

15

On Dec 31 2007, 8:09 pm, James B. [email protected] wrote:
…

I liked the Ruby community better when it placed more emphasis on code
and less on personalities.

Here, here!

My own introduction to the sociology of Ruby was an episode where some
individual thought that the wording of my question was a slight to
Ruby, comparing it to Python, and attempted to start a long rant
thread.

Fortunately, wiser heads simply answered my question with facts and
suggestions, and I got my task done.

OTOH, I suppose those that there are two communities that need to be
served as well the very task-oriented folks.

Perhaps we could have

comp.language.ruby.evaluation

for those that want to compare notes on what makes Ruby better or
worse than other language and, indeed, what are the definitions of
better or worse?

comp.language.ruby.preach_to_the_choir

for those take emotional sustenance from participation in the
community and want to co-sustain.

16

Robert D. wrote:

Short and pittyless: I hate the arrogancy (but very often there are
reasons for such things) of the guy, but would always consider
coperation with him. I believe that he has written stupid things,
ok, who has never? Do not even look at me but if you are I can prove
the contrary easily . . .
It is sad that he left the community and it is sad that he has
problems of finding a job, can we afford to lose such brilliant a
mind? I do not believe so, but our society does, what could one add?
Good luck Zed…

  1. Well … there are a lot of Ruby and Rails books on the market. But
    there are a lot more books on how to deal with “difficult” people.
    Francis’ point is valid. Behavior like Zed’s is unacceptable. It is
    grounds for immediate dismissal in every organization I’ve ever been a
    part of, and always will be. Behavior of that kind drives productive
    people away.

  2. Can we afford to lose such a brilliant mind? First of all, since this
    is a “community” and not an “organization”, I don’t think there’s a
    notion of “loss” here. That is, we couldn’t really have kicked him out
    if we had somehow “met and decided that he should be expelled.” So yes,
    if we have indeed “lost” Zed S., I think we can afford it. There are
    lots of brilliant people who are easy to work with, although anyone can
    be pushed to the limit.

  3. I also want to say something about programming and behavior a little
    more generic than just Ruby, Rails and Zed S… Decades ago Gerald
    Weinberg wrote a book, The Psychology of Computer Programming. Bear in
    mind that this book was written in a day and age when programmers were a
    scarce resource. I just checked Amazon and the book is still in print,
    and the Amazon page links to Weinberg’s blog if you’re interested. The
    point is that:

a. The psychology of programmers is different from that of some (but not
all) other professionals, and
b. There are enough good programmers that one in general does not need
to tolerate unacceptable behavior. That was not always the case.

  1. Mongrel is open source IIRC. 'Nuff said. :wink:
17

On Jan 1, 2008 4:12 PM, John J. [email protected]
wrote:

and will screw people at the drop of a hat AFTER making promises and
web frameworks do tend to be used by companies and groups that are
very clear about why they’re using a particular technology and pretty
well-grounded in reality. We all know that Rails’ hype sometimes can
be annoying.

Sounds like Zed just wants to do interesting programming and get
rewarded for it, not just well paid, but treated like a human being
without junior high school drama. Seems reasonable, but often
difficult to achieve.
Sorry for repeating myself but you put soo much better what I wanted
to say earlier.
Big thumbs up John.

Personally, I think Zed is a funny guy. I think I get his humor. But
I also hope he continues to develop good stuff in Ruby and realizes
that it is largely just the bad side of the culture of the web
development world that got to him.

Zed, get away from the web sites, do something without web stuff!
An interesting advice, but I am afraid that the problems you have
described earlier are generalized :frowning:

Cheers
Robert

http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,
it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Schopenhauer (attr.)

18

From: “Luis L.” [email protected]

On 1 ene, 00:13, Chuck R. [email protected] wrote:

Any how… I think Kevin C. labeled him correctly. See Zed’s rant
for the background on this reference.

Mmm, I wouldn’t say “KC was correct”, that makes you put a label on
someone you don’t know, someone who didn’t spoke directly to you or
you didn’t meet, that is worse than using bad words when speaking
about someone isn’t present at that time.

You’re probably right. On the other hand, how does D*ck Typing work
again? :wink:

Like Zed, we all have some differences with other users in the
community. Zed didn’t stab all the members of it, nor Ruby nor Rails,
but lot of folks must agree that Rails is becoming the next Java.

I don’t doubt there were some legitimate gripes there. But the
gestalt, the overall style of the rant had me thinking wryly of:

http://images.despair.com/products/demotivators/dysfunction.jpg

shrug

Anyway… Happy New Year !!! :slight_smile:

Regards,

Bill

19

Wes,

On Wed, 2008-01-02 at 04:10 +0900, WesR wrote:

On Dec 31 2007, 8:09 pm, James B. [email protected] wrote:
…

I liked the Ruby community better when it placed more emphasis on code
and less on personalities.

Here, here!

Hear, Hear!

–
Philip R.

Pricom Pty Limited (ACN 003 252 275 ABN 91 003 252 275)
GPO Box 3411
Sydney NSW 2001
Australia
Fax: +61:(0)2-8221-9599
E-mail: [email protected]

20

WesR wrote:

thread.

for those that want to compare notes on what makes Ruby better or
worse than other language and, indeed, what are the definitions of
better or worse?

comp.language.ruby.preach_to_the_choir

for those take emotional sustenance from participation in the
community and want to co-sustain.

Or comp.lang.factor, for people who still want to talk to Zed S… :wink:

But seriously, it’s been a while since I spent a lot of time elsewhere
in the comp.lang tree. But my dim recollection of comp.lang.forth,
comp.lang.lisp, and comp.lang.fortran is that it was the same way there
– newbies and old hands, flamewars and helpful hints, comparisons with
other languages, etc.

Of course, the difference between those three languages and Ruby is that
those three have been around a lot longer – in the case of FORTRAN and
LISP, since the very dawn of programming languages – and have settled
into their niches, have ANS standards and committees, etc. Ruby has yet
to do either. And judging by the success of the other major scripting
languages – Perl, Python and PHP – without them, Ruby may be able to
get along “forever” without a true “niche” or a “standards committee”.