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

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.

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.