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."

Comments

Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[MyDixieWrecked]

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?

Addendum

[aftk2]

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.

It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself

[DuranteAlighieri]

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:Ruby

[Watts Martin]

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.

Guess It Is Back To Lighttpd + FastCGI

[aldheorte]

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]

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).

Re:So what

[analogueblue]

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:It's remarkable that people still do this

[Sweetshark]

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/

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

[billstewart]

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.)