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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."
I've been saying RoR sucks for years. Where's my story?
Sucks. It's immature.
Only a fucking tool bag piece of shit would:
* 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. Ok, this is the summation of his first point. He got into a verbal argument with someone on his team about how patches should be handled. Kevin thought people should be able to submit patches to his workspace while Zed vehemently did not.
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.
My work here is dung.
He sounds like a real people person. I can't imagine why companies aren't jumping at the chance to hire this guy.
But for the absolute opposite reason: any community that would have this guy as a prominent member and/or mouthpiece is immature indeed.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Is there any particular reason this is relevant information other than the fact that a significant developer is leaving and that he evidently has personal issues with some of the other involved parties? I mean some of it is an entertaining read in much the same way an episode of Jerry Springer is, but is there anything really technical or interesting here?
To err is human, to really foul up requires a computer
Why did this even make the front page? It had no redeeming value except to prove that "Zed" is a pain to work with and unprofessional.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
If you tell me that your social network will take on facebook because it includes baby pictures then I'm going to laugh in your face. They are an established player with CIA backing.
Any real evidence of this, or is this his imagination?
Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
... really if i wanted to read crud like that I could sign up for a livejournal or myspace account.
I actually started to read TFA, but discovered that it appears to just be a bunch of high school drama. Or something.
Holy cow! I started reading TFA with the idea that there would be some good points in there, but never got to them. What a load of verbal abuse! Excuse me, but I don't fancy reading through that.
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.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I'm confused. Is this an attempt to knock down Ruby or Rails (Two things I know next to nothing about)? Because if it is, this is the worst argument against anything I've ever read.
The high-quality FYIQ (Fuck You I Quit) has a long tradition.
It comes as a function of personal disillusionment stemming from a realisation that the literally YEARS of effort put into something being worthless (in his case, clearly in financial terms).
When people do realise this, they tend to snap over to the opposite position pretty hard.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
I just read about 3/4 of his rant and 90% of it is his bitching about not having his ego stroked at every opportunity.
.com boom but I deserved to" sour grapes.
I hope this guy is a millionaire, because he certainly talks with the arrogance of one and I doubt he'll have much community respect after this (assuming anyone knows who he is). Sounds like "I didn't make my fortune during the
That guy must have a HUGE ego...and looking at his douchey picture on his blog, he thinks he's major hot shit.
Guess what buddy? You should be the new poster boy of
With the first link, the chain is forged.
rrrrr, mayte!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
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.
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 is hiring though; his weblog reminds me of theirs.
I'm starting a new social network for people with lame ideas. Does anyone know where I can get some good technical advice that won't cost much? I'm sure there's a pile of money for me when it's done!
Not trolling, just asking people to stop putting this kind of junk up front. It's a waste of everyone's time.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Well at least he's refreshingly specific in his hatred.
Zed, please don't beat me up; I'm a vegetarian and wear glasses. What's a DDR pad?
That is truly one bitter individual.
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.
The manager who dresses him down saying he can't code, then comes back later and claims he meant someone else. Since he's obviously too busy being angry he completely missed that the manager backtracked to try and protect himself from any lawsuits.
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.
Definition of Computer Scientist - someone with enough knowledge and skills to implement their own computer language.
Definition of Gentleman Computer Scientist - someone with enough knowledge and skills to implement their own computer language, but doesn't.
Apparently their "bigwig developers" are puerile hackers with little experience but huge chips on their shoulders. At least this one is.
It's really more of a case study in "how to get your blog flames noticed" than anything else.
Offering to kick people's ass and bragging about his martial arts prowess, with extra points for claiming to be deadly? What is this, Fidonet?
``With dozens of programming languages emerging every year, how can people still get riled up about any of them? I'm not even saying that people shouldn't argue which is better, but the fervor behind it strikes me as odd, given that there are so many essentially identical options to choose from.''
I think:
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
2. Many people get excited about things they _think_ are new and cool, even if these things aren't.
3. Some programming languages actually are worth getting excited about.
4. Compared to mainstream languages, many alternative languages have a lot to offer.
``Which language you're going to use is often just a matter of installed base and what someone else started a project with. How can anyone be emotional about that anymore?''
Just because your hands are tied doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to argue about what the best choice had been if you had had the freedom to choose. In fact, it probably makes such debate more important, because you could win by losing your shackles and choosing a better language anyway, or by doing the _next_ project in a better language.
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
And despite the myriad of languages
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
My favorite part is where he brags about having a business degree, except that prior to that he admitted to being homeless for a big chunk of the year.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
After skimming past a few paragraphs and seeing the level of his discourse, I had no confidence in his credibility and stopped reading.
This guy's rants are right up there on par with the Ultimate Warrior. http://www.ultimatewarrior.com/
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
As he ponders his rent, he might realize that Junior Sysadmin at Google pays more than massuse or spooge-mopper. They get to write cool code on the side too, so he could do some more fun things with criminal records or fingerprints if he wanted to. Who knows, he might have impressed the boss with his skilz and moved up the ladder. If not, Google could have rented the coliseum in Rome for a grudge match to the death.
When a good company offers you a job with good money, the answer is "when can I start?"
So after 6 months of homeless living, he continued to work on the project for another year and a half? That's dedication. I always thought people were giving those guys money for charity on the freeway. I had no idea you could trade them hamburgers for software development.
It's a pretty big accomplishment for Ruby to push a guy into homelessness too. Think about all the WoW guys out there just playing a video game day in and day out. Those guys all have homes. I can't think of another product that will push people out into the street. Kazaa with all the RIAA's assistance hasn't even done that yet. I suppose that makes it a feature.
I read the slashdot summary and thought to myself "Oh no! Mongrel is a very well-respected and popular component of many Rails apps. This is a huge loss to the RoR community!".
Then I read his post (and had flashbacks to 8th Grade).
Let's just say I am no longer concerned in the slightest.
Vote Libertarian
Ive been using RoR for the past couple of months for a pet project of mine. no large loads or anything, just a portal with some SOAP to another portal and simple things like that.
ROR ROCKS as a platform, although i do agree that its performance isnt as stable as the one found on java servers, but i do think that the whole idea makes up for that fact. Ror is so simple to program, so cheap to program for, that youll be able to afford a litle 4 box cluster for it and come up way ahead. I like teh ror.
Now, this guy made mongrel, which did become a key piece of a production/stable RoR deployment. Hes good, no use in denying that.
He is also very socially challenged, its sad that he blames his inability to find a job to his own (great) work on RoR. Maybe when you say to the HR guy that you are god, that if they hire you is in that condition, then you may get the cold shoulder: noone likes a brager. Not even Russel Cocker (to think of a wonder-consultant extraordinaire) is that cocky. Hell, he aint cocky at all and he made a great consultant's howto for IT professionals which i recommend to this angry blogger.
NO SIG
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.
``There are massive costs associated with moving to a new language in any decently sized company, from lack of developers who know it, lack of developers in the company who know it, lack of internal libraries for it, lack of internal company support and so on. So yeah you either get a working product in Java or a half assed product in language X written by people who have no idea how to use language X bad have to remake the wheel 55 thousand times due to lack of pre-existing libraries.'' ...and yet, the world at large managed to move to Java. And PHP. So I really don't think your explanation holds up to scrutiny, sensible as it sounds.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Well, obviously there is a painful need for regulation to defend people like him from their saying anything affecting their job prospects.
Because, after all:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
As for pro bodyguards: if they're there to protect you, and not just to show off how important you are, then they carry Uzis.
Pudge, you work here. You just claimed that you could hurt someone, on your company's web site.
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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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).
Zed, my man, I suggest you take up yak herding for a few years and see if people have forgotten about this when we're on "Web 4.0." This was not a FYIQ Rails, this was a FYIQ the industry.
You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills... Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
2/1/2007
Today, Theo de Raadt declared that henceforth he would "be nice to people", because "not even the mightiest asshole gods on Mount Asshole can top the the egomaniacal rantings of this Rails douchebag who no-one has ever heard of".
By comparing the significance of their work versus there public tactfulness, Linus Torvalds has now been awarded the Nobel Prize for niceness, and the American Marriage Council has awarded Hans Reiser 'Husband Of The Year'.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
I mean, if you're a real tough guy you'll just burn the fucker's house down while he sleeps inside of it. When he flees the building, then you go to town with a 8lb baby sledge while his children watch.
(If you're gonna call 'pussy', you really should come with something more hardcore)
Blar.
You can be Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Ada Augusta all rolled into one. But if you can't work with people, you're just another jerk, and none of your big ideas are going to go anywhere, no matter how good they are.
Except for the foul language, of course.
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.
Oh, and I should also point out that -- I feel silly pointing it out, because I don't want to make you look stupid, but you said it, and so, for the record -- even if I was actually making a claim that I could hurt him -- which I was not -- that simply does not constitute a threat. Those are two VERY different things. A threat would be saying that I *would*, rather than *could*, hurt him, which I absolutely did not do.
"If you haven't noticed, I'm funny and enjoy having fun. Enjoy my site, tell me if you use my projects. Don't take it too seriously though, it's all an act."
Probably just another FSJ
I think your perception of the market is a bit outdated: Python is at least as important for scripting as is Perl by now. C#/.Net is not even on your Radar, although it is important in webdevelopment and BI.
;-)
Of cause it is a shame that we are not using lisp for almost anything by now
...because he graduated with honours from the Theo de Raadt School of Diplomacy.
Some predictions for 2008:
* Zed will fork and re-factor the framework, quietly releasing the far technically superior and more stable "OpenRails".
* Google will use OpenRails to successfully deploy the Beta release of its Next Big Thing. It handles thousands of requests per nanosecond and Google's share price spikes, though it doesn't account for any of Google's revenue.
* The PHP community declares "OpenRails is dead!"
Syntactic sugar and (as you said) a lack of libraries.
It frustrates me to no end that I can't just pick a language for a project and use the mountains of java|ruby|perl libraries that I'm already familiar with. By now most languages ought to be able to compile themselves or be interpreted on one or 2 mainstream runtimes, or at least have a convenient method of calling each other's libraries.
I know there are several languages that run on the JVM, and that the intenion of Parrot is to address just this issue, but JVM is huge, slow to start, and not generally very well adjusted for running small scripts or CGI programs (the kind of programs I tend to write a lot), and Parrot's been in development at least since 2002, with only a few languages working on it, most of them incomplete.
I thought this guy had some interesting ideas on the subject: http://www.equi4.com/moam/nuts
Duct tape, XML, democracy: Not doing the job? Use more.
92.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot. (Yes, I had to.)
Why does this thread suddenly read like a continuation of TFA?
today is spelling optional day.
This guy reminds me of a favorite old movie of mine "The Dirty Dozen" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dirty_Dozen. His only problem is he got caught (a.k.a. he went public).
Anyone who buy into the idea that the Top IT Guys are making $$ hand over fist, just don't get it. You give me 100 guys like this (who are throw always, talented, and hungry literally), and I can fix the Evil Empire's Code without breaking a sweat, of course we will break every rule in the book. All we need to do is to is introduced these guys to the real enemies out there, and turn them loose with a little guidance, appropriate pay, and Kodo's. Of course it won't be pretty.
I hope he reads this, cuz he would understand.
Mongrel also supplanted lighttpd pretty quickly.. like flipping a switch. Rails is built so you can drop in your web server of choice fairly easily. It's simple enough to migrate to another, and his leaving doesn't exactly make all the installed mongrel instances break.
Wow, I knew Zed was an interesting character, but this is just crazy. Good riddance.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
For more detail, I refer you to Wikipedia's entry on American treatment of Assault or Findlaw's Assault entry.
Why are you going around putting people down for being insulting and then calling them "pathetic" and "childish?"
He says he's not looking for pity but I can't help feeling sorry for him; he's tired, clearly in pain and has just put up a public career suicide note.
It's Zed's. Who's Zed? Zed's dead. Well, career-wise at least ;-)
i stopped somewhere around the paragraph where he was renting a boxing ring. why would slashdot bother promoting this schmuck? i don't often, if ever, comment on the editors' choice of what to post, but this is just a waste of space, bandwidth and consciousness.
And here so many people a few days ago were saying how there was no reason or benefit to Google up someone's blogging or online life during the hiring process.
Regardless if the things are true or not, this is the single most entertaining thing I have read on the Internet in last few months.
No need to apologize; it's just a bit hypocritical...
Cause from all impressions I see, it's almost impossible to be not making good money in Perl atm...
http://www.presicient.com/langjobs.html
Yeah. We moved from assembly, too. And COBOL/Fortran. But we don't move often, and the grandparent explains why. Companies only move to a new language when:
- It's enough better that it's a Big Win(TM), or
- It's got good enough marketing to persuade some pointy-haired bosses that it will solve all their problems.
I'd guess that companies move more often for the second reason, because when you come right down to it, the first doesn't happen very often...
Quoting 'more to come'...."why the Pickaxe book is what killed Ruby"
I'll be interested in what he says, at least on this subject. I;ve never liked the pickaxe book. It was a most unexciting read that failed to get me in to meta programming, one of Ruby's major strengths. Considering how enjoyable the forerunner was, "The Pragmatic Programmer", this book put me off any other of their productions, since it appears that when these authors tackle concrete material they can't deliver.
I read this far:
His dumb little company VaporSet had this stupid setup where the people deploying Rails didn't have root access. I told Kevin that this was stupid...And then I lost all interest in his sad little rant. Even getting that far, I suspect he's said actionable things - I hope his "enemies" aren't as unbalanced as he appears to be.
I also think it's a shame Slashdot published this article, as one man's personal diatribe is just rather distasteful.
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
I think it's better if I don't comment on the rant itself. I think I can offer a little bit of general background information, though.
It's important to note that there is a distinction between the "classic" Ruby community (led by Matz), and the Rails community (led by DHH). Since Rails is built atop Ruby, Rails jobs are also Ruby jobs, but the two communities still have very different cultures.
Mongrel is a Ruby web application container mostly written in Ruby, except for the HTTP parser is written in C/Ragel. It has very good performance, and the Ragel state machine definition was derived directly from the BNF in the HTTP specification, so it also has extremely strict standards compliance. It became the most popular web application container for Rails. Since most of Mongrel is written in Ruby and most of the rest is in Ragel, we eventually got a JRuby/Java version of it too. These days Glassfish is becoming an increasingly popular substitute for Mongrel on JRuby, however.
fastthread is a Ruby library which "hot-fixes" the Ruby standard library to provide optimized versions of its thread synchronization primitives. It was mainly intended to improve performance, but as a side-effect it also worked around some long-standing bugs in the core Ruby classes which resulted in memory leaks and interpreter crashes under high load. Mongrel ended up requiring fastthread as a dependency because it was the only way to stably run a high-throughput application using the synchronization primitives on the 1.8 interpreter. fastthread is unnecessary on other Ruby implementations like Ruby 1.9 and JRuby.
DNA just wants to be free...
I fully expect the Chuck Norris jokes to be re-written using "Zed Shaw." Yeah, I read TFA in it's entirety, and I couldn't help but feel that the punch-line was going to be delivered ... real soon. Maybe Zed could cure cancer by roundhouse kicking the teeth out of the Dalai Lama and harvesting his tears ...
I'm sorry, but Python isn't nearly as important as Perl. If it had 10% of the marketshare I'd be shocked- in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs. One was an app the author wrote to try out Python, the other we rewrote in Perl. A lot of Python users want to thing its big, but it just isn't.
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.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Or are you saying that lying comes easily to you
``Yeah. We moved from assembly, too. And COBOL/Fortran. But we don't move often, and the grandparent explains why. Companies only move to a new language when:
- It's enough better that it's a Big Win(TM), or
- It's got good enough marketing to persuade some pointy-haired bosses that it will solve all their problems.
I'd guess that companies move more often for the second reason''
I'm completely with you up to here.
``, because when you come right down to it, the first doesn't happen very often...''
And now I disagree. There are and have always been better languages than the ones that got widespread use. It frustrates me no end that technically inferior products that come later win out over superior ones that were there before.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
If you haven't noticed, I'm funny and enjoy having fun. Enjoy my site, tell me if you use my projects. Don't take it too seriously though, it's all an act. It looks like slashdot may have been hoodwinked.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Well, when what you're FYIQing is not a company but an open-source community, the FYIQ letter to the boss is not an option. Isn't the great thing about open-source that all this stuff is public? ;)
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Good job, there, Zed, in committing professional suicide in a highly public manner.
I bet you'll be looking for one of those $29/hour fast food manager jobs, I don't think Wendy's bothers to google candidate names...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
This story is already flamebait enough as it is to add fuel to the fire in responding to ACs and trolls.
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.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I was told by a police officer before that the difference between saying i will beat you up with my hands at my sides and raising my hands while saying it is assault, it all has to do with the perceived danger at the time?
Commercial firms tend to use older technologies; in open source, the situation is different. In average Linux distribution for example, there is probably more Python code than Perl code. Also, these two links may be helpful:
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/perl.do
http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/python.do
Personally, I prefer to either IED the fucker or snipe him from a hundred yards with a Dragunov or a Marine Remington 700.
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.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
..because that's not what Rails is all about. You could rant your ass of on how much people using Joomla sucks. The average Joomla dude has no technical skills whatsoever, barely knows what PHP is and uses other peoples designs (read: templates) for his webpages. There's no point complaining about this, as the attributes of the Joomla user is what they are because of the way Joomla works - easy to set up for a noob, no techie skills required.
Same thing about Rails. Rails has always been about programmer happiness and pretty code. This has naturally led to a community where the tech stuff isn't considered as much as the pretty-code-stuff. People doesn't give Zed praise for mongrel because they don't know enough about Ruby to realize how awesome Mongrel is.
Or even Smalltalk, given that Ruby is YASC (Yet Another Smalltalk Clone).
That is all.
You are the one making a big deal out of nothing and you are saying that HE is out of touch?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
That doesn't seem to stop idiots from bringing lawsuits, unfortunately.
:)
I'm enjoying this thread (it reminds me of lots of inter-company/skill-field spats I've seen or been a participant in, and personally I'm on your side) but I'm not sure I would have brought it up on my own company's web site forum. It's, well, crass.
Much better to respond to him on his own, er, hunting ground. Hah.
tic!lock
(not really new here)
A lot of Python users want to thing its big, but it just isn't. If it had 10% of the marketshare I'd be shocked- in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs.
Perhaps your experience is somewhat limited. Python is in heavy use and/or development at Google, Microsoft, YouTube (now part of Google but they made the choice independently), the Washington Post, NASA, etc.
Is that enough to make it "big"? Well you didn't define "big" so it's hard to say. I think that measured in lines of code, Perl is much bigger than Python. As is COBOL. And FORTRAN. So what? Accumulated lines of code is not a very interesting metric.
I love your sig - it made me laugh for five minutes or more straight.
I'm stealing it.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Good grief, get a room, you two. ;)
...
:*)
Spun, what he said was that he "could hurt him". That's potentially true, on this website, he can, in public reputation - but Zed already pretty much blew that away himself, didn't he?
pudge, you should have cut off your responses in this thread a while back, and you know it.
Ok, go ahead and ban me now...
damn kids, get off my, er, your lawn, uh...
tic!lock
I think he was going more for the whole "legal fight" angle, which is what a lot of commenters seem to have missed. It may be "tough" to burn someone's house down, but it's not very smart, especially if his kids and him are witnesses.
Female Prison Rape in NY
* read's TFA title ... head asplodes *
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.
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?
;)
That's a strawman argument. What he said in no way justified what you analogized it to.
(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)
First off, a better thing to say would be that you're *not aggressive*, ie, that you don't start fights. Anyone who says that they are "non-violent" I have to assume is either naive or an idiot. I can violently defend myself against an attacker, for example. The next two points are irrelevant to the discussion, if not to your bad analogy. The last one just plain doesn't make sense. Are you saying you can't use a can of gas and a match? Perhaps you meant to say that you have no idea how to commit arson *undetectably* which is true of the vast majority of the population, I suspect (except perhaps firefighters *g*)
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.
Maybe he is a "typically clueless robot-like nerd", you insensitive clod. You might have just hurt his feelings, or worse
Try that kind of crap in the real world and you have to defend what you said.
There, fixed that for you.
tic!lock
Tai chi does have a few techniques for fighting with sticks or knives, though I get the impression they're mainly there to give younger guys something to keep them interested so they can learn the less flashy parts. The real risk in fighting against an older tai-chi practitioner is that if you can't always tell whether he's a newbie or has been doing this stuff for 20 years, and can take all that slow controlled stuff and do it really fast. I suspect that if a bar brawl were to start happening around my teacher, either it would get distracted by a couple of confusing remarks, or the participants would find that some of them were sitting on the floor unharmed while the others were throwing punches that kept missing their targets.
My college theater professor's boyfriend taught aikido as well as fencing, and he gave us a day's lesson as part of our classes. It was kind of fun to throw a punch at him, and find myself on the floor without him having used much of any force. It doesn't take too much work to learn how to deflect attacks from unskilled fighters so you've got time to get out of their way; doing so without anybody else getting hurt requires more skill. Tai chi has some of that as well; it's especially useful for the kind of fights where you don't want to hurt the other person, like when your kids are mad and feel like thrashing at you.
Chuck Norris says his actual way of dealing with fights is to not get into them, and walk away if he has to. Just because you _can_ beat the other guy up doesn't mean you have to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Fortunately, there's no need to read the long internet-tough-guy pissing-contest to find out what an joy Zed would be to have as a coworker. He has conveniently provided an All About Me section that condenses his titanic ego in a smaller, more easily digested form.
It's titled "Zed's So Fucking Awesome", and proceeds in the opposite direction of humility after that.
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language.
In my experience, all software development is high risk, high return. Because the risks are high, and because so few people know anything about software development, there is tendency to use a conservative approach to language and technology by selecting large vendors or recognised "brands".
As it turns out, this is actually the worst possible way to reduce the risk of software development, but this has not yet become apparent for a number of reasons.
1) Software development, unlike bridge building, has not been practised for thousands of years, so there is no comparable canon of knowledge to draw best practices from.
2) Software project failures are not published for forensic analysis that could be used to improve the state of the art.
3) Software is a ridiculously profitable business for the few that succeed at it, and so vendors spend their greatest efforts on marketing their wares to people who (a) are the decision makers in business and (b) are clueless about software development.
Personally, I don't see much towards a solution to these problems in the open source movement, because egos tend to get in the way of admissions of failure.
Oh, sure. But if threat of lawsuit were a deterrent to me, I'd shut off my computer and never turn it back on. :-)
:-)
;)
Hell, I get that feeling often even without the lawsuit thing. *g*
Shrug. I post where I post. I am no respector of persons, nor of web sites.
Hey, no sweat, I feel the same way. I just prefer to take the battle to the enemy. If you fight him inside your perimeter, you may win, but the casualties can be high.
Just sayin. Since I don't really know you, I guess I'm out of line. But this is still a fun thread. It reminds me of usenet somehow *g*
t
Again with the "shoulds." No, in fact, you're wrong. There is no "should" here. There's only choices and consequences, none of them objectively superior to the other in the abstract, but only weighed against the intended consequences. If my goal were to not look bad to some people, sure, I should stop. Hell, I wouldn't have started. If my goal were to not waste time, then that too, would have prevented me from continuing. That is, of course, not my goal. My goal here? Entertainment and intellectual stimulation at the end of the day. So by no means should I have stopped.
...
;)
Fair enough. Alright, let me amend that. *I* would have. Not because it might have got me in trouble, and not because I'm concerned about how it makes me look. But because this sort of argument can become a self-feeding bad habit, and I have better things to do.
> Ok, go ahead and ban me now...
Hm. I sure hope you're joking.
In the slashdot sort of sense, yes.
t
Or something.
What I was trying to say is that, when you're an established company, with an existing codebase and talent that knows how to develop software using language X, language Y has to be a big win before it's worth moving. It doesn't matter whether you should have used Y rather than X in the first place. It doesn't even matter that Y is better. Y has to be a lot better.
Yeah, that part was even tackier than the rest. If he were to get in _my_ face like that I'd say "Sure, you do that. Saturday, High noon." And on Monday, if he was still pissed about my not showing up Saturday, I'd explain aikido to him.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't care about Ruby, Rails, or their community. I didn't even read the whole damn article because it's mostly rehashing the same shit. Here's what I took away from what I did read:
Zed's awesome. Anyone who doesn't acknowledge Zed's awesomeness is fucking retarded. Anyone who actively disagrees should fight Zed. Anyone who fights Zed would lose, because after all, Zed's awesome. Zed's tears cure cancer, too bad Zed has never cried - ever.
Zed, while there may be merit to some of your complaints, that doesn't change the fact that you're a colossal egotistical prick.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Shit, and it nearly grazed your cap too!
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.
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
Can any mods give that sentence +5 insightful? The rest of the post is great as well, but that sentence shows insight.
It also neatly encapsulates one of the major theorems about Internet social behaviour.
Or something.
;)
Yeah, it gets complicated.
I'm in my forties, and the older I get, the less I find myself able to ignore other people's BS. But the penalties for calling on them on it continue to get higher.
An old friend calls it "cultural communication dysfunction". I think it's a great term but naming something doesn't help fix it...
t
Did you see his picture in the article? He's obviously this guy!
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.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Oh the stories I could tell about various open source projects I've worked with. This isn't a good or bad thing, just "Open Source."
The difference between open source and proprietary code is that "open source" (at least of yore) is built by passionate and driven people while closed source gets built by who get paid. It takes a lot of drive and passion to work on things that don't pay. You do it for ego, you do it for creative release, you do it for personal reasons, thus the work you do is personal.
This Zed guy is just caught in the middle of some ego battles and bad personalities, and he has is own issues as well to boot. Any slashdotters free of this may cast the first stone.
My advice to the Zed guy, take a chill pill, Zen out a bit, and clean up the rant but keep the criticism, its important.
Python is actually overshadowing Perl in high-profile open-source work now -- it's installed by default on new Macs and most Linux distros, and it's the main language for OLPC's XO, much of the Gnome project, most of what Canonical does on its own, and of course Google. I know Perl is still holding strong in business and academic research (and Slashcode), but programmers with the opportunity to choose the language they'll write in seem to be choosing Python fairly regularly now.
Frameworks are for wimps. There I said it twice. Go ahead, flame away.
Chuck Norris came along and bent the ruby rails into loops!
#!/usr/bin/huckabee
use CHUCK_NORRIS;
That's as far as I've gotten with my new language.
I've decided it will be statically typed. With Huckabee types, you know where everything stands.
I guess somebody got really sick of this guy's seemingly poor attitude and decided to stick it to him just a little harder. Get something like this posted on /. and this guy will never work as a programmer again. Slick move...
Do you see what happens, Larry, WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS? THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, LARRY!
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS!
So he flames the whole rails community and then states it all stems from their dabbling in PHP prior to trying rails?
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?
You could force him to use vi on Windows 3.0, but really: do you hate him that much?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So it goes something like (in BASIC code):
:)
10 DIM X(1 TO 4) AS STRING
20 X(1) = "I'm god."
30 X(2) = "You suck."
40 X(3) = "Fuck you, you stupid shit."
50 X(4) = "I'm going to stab you in the face with my superior ninja skillz."
60 FOR I = 1 to 65535
70 FOR J = 1 to 42
80 PRINT SENTENCES(INT(RND(1)*4)+1)
90 NEXT J
100 NEXT I
110 PRINT "To be continued."
120 GOTO 10
Anyone care to port it to Perl ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
who thought this was a thread about choo-choos?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I'd rather be waterboarded than use vi!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Funny.
If you haven't noticed, I'm funny and enjoy having fun. Enjoy my site, tell me if you use my projects. Don't take it too seriously though, it's all an act.
I think he is having you all on.
Chris
--I love Ruby, by the way, not that it matters
Best. Headline. Ever.
Sounded like an interesting story but the guy must not know any English besides profanities, so I've had to skip the whole thing.
What a shame.
I thought he would be a programmer, not a sailor.
To get an idea of what's wrong with Zed, who is an awesome programmer with an obvious ego problem, check out his project Utu. I'll save you the trouble of clicking and just post the first line on the site "The Internet needs more hate. Much more." While the tech is fascinating, it's pretty disturbing when you read the vitriolic reasoning underpinning it and realize how much effort he's put into this.
I found Zed's post yesterday by the way, and consciously decided NOT to post it to Slashdot even though I knew I'd see it here within a couple days because it's NOT NEWSWORTHY. As many people have noted above, him getting pissed off about the people he's worked with. He's obviously not comfortable unless he's doing something different like when he talks about Ragel State Machines and gleefully demonstrates that Rick Olsen doesn't understand Ragel after a quick intro to it (it's in the middle of the document). Zed's a bright guy, but a lot of these people, like Rick Olsen have contributed TONS of high quality code to the community.
Are we really supposed to believe, that this incredibly smart programmer latched onto a technology that is a piece of crap and stayed there for as long as he did without thinking it had merit? His best argument against rails, about DHH having to restart his site 400 times a day is now a non-issue thanks to the software he wrote to fix it. And that portion of the software really had little to do with rails per-se, but rather how rails interfaces with Apache (FastCGI had tons of issues). All it proves is that DHH and the rails core at the time did a shitty job integrating the framework into the web-server, nothing more.
Really, this is just a tragedy, Zed's a smart, incredibly talented person, who just can't handle people, and wound up in some bad situations. It's a loss for the Rails community, but the problem isn't rails, it's Zed.
Photos.
I don't want to be a 'Ruby guy' anymore
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.
Make sure you include some runtime checking, because you never know what might get loaded and linked.
He'll probably get another chance, quite possibly from someone who has done something dumber. This pales in comparison to what many actors and musicians have done, and they still manage to get work in their field. It's quite possible software engineering is heading in a similar direction, especially where the act of building it becomes a public performance of sorts. Talent often trumps personality.
It will ultimately boil down to whether or not he can identify another niche and successfully build a product to fill that niche. A hotshot with a chip on his shoulder and something to prove has the motivation to do it, even if the reasons are a little pathological. See actor/musician comparison above.
All that said, I wouldn't want to work with him, and I'm hoping someone more levelheaded manages to metaphorically kick his ass in the next niche he competes in.
There's some interesting stuff in those links thanks.
I noticed in particular that despite python growing and Perl slightly sliding, Perl still has an order of magnitude advantage.
Also, it seems that a lot of the jobs, the contracting ones anyways, are fairly badly paid. There's a big lump at the low end and a cluster at the top end, but not much in the middle.
Ah, yes, that's completely right.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Because I can't see him getting too much more work.
What company in their right mind would hire him, knowing that if they don't measure up as an employer, they're in for public vilification? He might be good, but he's not worth it!
Yeah, but 63% of the time that statistic is quoted, it's incorrect.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
My experience has been that the wheel gets constantly re-invented in new languages because a non-trivial (I suspect majority) percentage of programmers would rather re-invent something than work with an existing library.
That kind of behavior is absurd on its face, but the reason behind it is the same basic principle behind the 'throw the first one away' philosophy of development. Sometimes, in order to understand a particular domain sufficiently to utilize tools which operate within/on it, you have to explore it by writing the tools yourself. In doing so, you may or may not (likely not) produce a superior set of tools compared to what already exists, but it will often be the case that you will be more productive with your self-produced tools, even if they are markedly inferior, due to your much deeper understanding of them.
The problem with ultra high-level languages/framework combos like Ruby/Rails is that you start to get real nasty artifacts of poor abstractions from people who don't have sufficient understanding of or experience with developing and working with abstract models[1]. These get worse and worse as they begin to delve deeper into the increasingly esoteric areas beyond high-level application-specific code.
Personally, I'm of the pragmatic school of thought on this. As long as it works for you, it's fine, and no skin off my back in any case.
That being said, I can understand where the guy is coming from, even if I think that that type of rant is distasteful (and stupid from a professional career standpoint). The problems begin showing up when these things start showing up in heavily hyped middleware, frameworks, and libraries. It gets harder to simply live and let live when people hype something hard without knowing enough to realize that it's horribly crippled. This goes doubly so when they don't understand enough to realize that it's horribly crippled even after the reasons are explained to them. The worst, of course, is when someone knows their pet project is broken, but continues to drag everyone else along due to hubris, inability to correct or at least admit to the problem, prioritizing other interests more highly, or whatever have you.
Sometimes you can simply jump ship from that particular project. Other times, with smaller communities (of any sort, not just developers), the keepers of the keys to the golden goose can screw things up for their entire community ecosystem. In software development, one of the most frustrating things that can happen is that a crippled project works (or is simply popular) enough that you're forced to continue working with it, causing your project to be plagued by and littered with the collateral damage of having to work with badly leaky abstractions and poor implementations.
Things of course get more heated and less objective if you've personally invested yourself in a community or project affected by situations like those described above.
[1]I've found this to be particularly noticeable when inexperienced programmers try to implement a scripting or domain-specific language without understanding the concept of, e.g., a graph, which leads to no concept of a parse tree, which tends to limit them to things that resemble bastardized DOS batch files with no flow control or nested statements. They don't have enough understanding to recognize that source code is a description of a non-linear graph, and end up writing a script engine that can only parse a flat linear sequence of instructions.
The worst case I saw was that the script engine was so tightly coupled to a specific script that you had to revise the engine itself if you changed the order of some of the logically independent statements in the script (or maybe the worst was one that reminded me of working with a sad, sad assembly interpreter because variables were fixed in number, name, and data type in the script engine itself, and scripts had to work with them almost like registers). Don't get me wrong—the guys who did tho
Actually, it's automatically verifying that the code complies with the spec (presuming that you have a spec).
I'm firmly convinced that writing automated tests around the time you develop some code (before or shortly after) really and truly works. Nearly every software development methodology I've encountered in the last 20 years has struck me as around 80% snake oil, but test-oriented programming is the one exception.
What zed actually objected to was having absurd quantities of test code (something like 5 to 1, he claims), and that indeed does sound excessive.
That's just his style. He's edgy and extreme and "in your face", right?
Let's analyze a little. His blog is called "Zed's So Fucking Awesome", highlighting a word that appears 28 more times in that page (I mean "Zed", not "fuck". That shows up 32 more times).
He has a photo of him wearing a Ming the Merciless goatee and brandishing his emphatically left-handed guitar.
The first 3 links I see scanning downwards are "me", "rants", and "All About Me".
Now, it's not so simple as saying "oh, he's full of himself." No, that may also be true, but this is part of his persona. This is how he likes the world to see him. It's badass to be full of yourself and not give a damn what anyone thinks. It's badass to make a long list of everyone who's "pissed in my cheerios", litter it with obscenities and challenges and references to your ninja powers, and post it for all to see.
I didn't read much past that whole martial arts section... he started posting chat logs to show how other people can be rude online.
So, I don't think I'd enjoy interacting with him (obviously the attitude is more important than anything else he wants to get done in life), but then again, it's a big world and I'm probably safe from that.
I'm not sure what this says about RoR, if anything. There are Zed-like personalities all over the place. What's interesting to me is that he became part of the *public* face of the RoR community. Even what "community" means in that context is interesting... not so long ago, the "community" would have been puttering along on its forums while the company managed the public face and made sure the main developers of whatever software product were safely kept far away from both the community and that public face.
With RoR, we get to see the developers (many with fairly primitive "public-face" skills...) in the spotlight. And people react to attention in funny ways when they aren't used to it. There are all kinds of benefits to this kind of bubble-up, but this is one of the downsides... and we just gotta try and get over it. Part of that would be ignoring the Zeds, I imagine.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Everybody always brings up google and python. Does anybody know what percent of code at google is python? Is it mission critical code or just some sysadmin scripting?
Oh and they installed sharepoint where I work. The workers refused to use it despite threats from management. I was shocked at the degree of revulsion the users expressed.
We ended up ditching it and installed plone. Seems to much better liked. What's shocking was that it was faster then sharepoint. Go figure.
evil is as evil does
That's because people assume they've got to make some huge switch from one language to another, using the new one for everything.
Any C/C++/Java shop could do itself a huge favor by using to Ruby/Python/Perl for lighter tasks, prototyping etc. If you don't have a library for something, don't try to write that thing in that language. If you do, pick the easiest language for the problem.
Any real coders (as opposed to those who tinker at an existing app but never write new code) are going to be trying new tools all the time. That already blows the 100% consistency that people are trying for anyways. When you've got to learn a new build tool, why not also learn a new language that fits another niche you're working on?
Horses for courses. Don't prototype your new website in C++, don't code your memory manager in Ruby. If you do more than one thing, you'll need more than one tool.
Unfortunately, a large number of Web technologies (HTML, Javascript, Java, Ruby, Rails, Perl, Apache, ...) were created to address short-term needs, but the people who created them were learning as they went along and the technologies got hyped up and picked up far too early.
Good technology needs a balance between practicality and theoretical soundness. Unfortunately, in pursuit of dot-com riches, a lot of technologies have been commercialized and frozen far too quickly.
... it's not the usual turn of phrase, ...
if you can read through his language:
There are a lot of managers making money in the software industry by failing to solve problems.
They don't like their boats rocked, because they all dream of becoming like Bill Gates.
just another excuse for more hardware doing less work and making it possible for more people to earn minimum wage pushing buttons and failing to think.
>When people first read this rant they mistakenly assumed I was whining about not having a job
>and blaming that on Rails. I'm not whining, I'm not sick, or crazy, just pissed off and I can
>write about it so fuck you very much.
The entire article is a bunch of swearing, and irc logs about petty disputes he has had with other members of the rails community. They are pretty formulaic along these lines:
guy: hey, zedas! you're a douche.
zedas: nah, uh. You're a douch!
etc.
This isn't to criticize the guy for writing the article, as it's his right to get steam off on his personal blog. However, I've got to wonder why this got posted on slashdot, as it really isn't tech news. Not every dispute that takes place on the internet is tech news.
you might want to add a Jack Bauer string type it would have similar functionality to python r"" strings.
My keyboads not woking popely.
Actually, Python is a very common language selection for risk systems and trading systems in the investment banking industry, nearly always with links to C or C++ libraries for numerically intensive code. Of the platforms for which I have true knowledge of the implementation language, I can think of the following:
Commercial systems:
C 2
C++ 2
C++/Python 1
Internal systems:
C 2
Java/C++ 2
Java/C 1
Java 1
Python/C 3
Python/C++ 3
VB 1
I have seen a lot of code in this business, but never more than about a one-page Perl script. I suspect the sysadmin side uses Perl quite a bit more, though.
My background: I am a quant in the finance industry, and have just over 20 years' professional experience.
My point is that nerdishly chortling "technically I did not threaten you hur hur hur hur" while stopping just shy of an actual threat is still an extremely poor practice. I'm not sure if you've spent most of your life coding in a basement for Slashdot or what but try walking around an actual workplace (or, for bonus points, a bar) and saying things like "I could hurt you" and see where that gets you. The meaning of words doesn't necessarily match their literal content. That is how sarcasm works. That is how a great deal of human communication works.Says who? Evidentially you have your own personal definition of "imply" but for your future reference these are two totally unrelated terms. It is entirely impossible to imply something without intending to do it. A bluff (look it up!) would be one example. I have, in fact, non-violently bluffed my out of several situations by implying violence that I did not truly intend to commit. In several situations I have scared away threatening groups of people by waving around a baseball bat. Did I really intend to cave their heads in? Heck no, but it sure worked.So you've always been clueless when it comes to human interactions. Have you improved at all since you were 10? There's no justifying violence but you do understand that you provoked that, right? Human beings are living organisms with emotions, not lines of code.
I'm just trying to help you here. Clearly you lack basic human interation skills, as proved by your example above and further proved by the fact that nearly everybody on this thread thinks that your post was tacky and clueless. Might want to work on that. Or not. If it makes you feel any better, I agree with you that the Rails dude's "rant" was equally lame for different reasons.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
No way. That language is NOT ready for prime-time. A statically-typed Huckabee is bloated. Period. It's certainly not a scalar type. It'll be stored on the heap and that's going to slow things down.
Besides, why waste so much time with that?
You can just declare all your variables as type ROMNEY and they can be implicitly cast as whatever you like.
Furthermore, on the database side, if you're using SQL Server you can use the ROMNEY cursor. It can change positions dynamically. It's quite efficient. And on a personal note, my favorite part of it is the simple execution. Sometimes Romney.execute() is exactly what the situation might call for.
Of course, everyone knows that you shouldn't trust SQL Server when it comes to Integrity. I would only really trust Oracle. What we need now is to make a reall CONNECTION. Todays issues are GLOBAL and we need a President who believes in adLockOptimistic.
global O;
O->bama();
"High noon" What is this, the old west? "If he were to get in _my_ face like that" Now you see, you totally missed the point. This is part of what he is saying he is sick of. And it really does just make you look like an idiot. His whole point is that you pimple-faced nerdlings like to make these empty threats that will never play out. He is not saying that he can kick anyone's butt six ways to Sunday, he is making a point about the absurdity of your threats.
> in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs.
That's not 7 years of professional programming, that's 1 year repeated 7 times.
(Capcha: "hopeless".... indeed)
Before you design for reuse, make sure to design it for use.
But whatever, I don't care that much. I am still not sure who is more deranged, Zed Shaw or Uwe Boll. Or who has the sillier name, for that matter!
-The phrase "I could hurt you"
-Your full name and address
Good luck with that. Heck, even feel free to ensconce the phrase "I could hurt you" in a context that makes it fairly clear that you won't hurt them - I suspect that "I could hurt you, but I won't" is going to be met with about the same reaction.
To be honest, I'm not even sure what you're arguing about at this point. Are you arguing that "I will hurt you" and "I could hurt you" mean different things in a grammatical sense? I'm absolutely on board with you there. My only real point is that they generally convey the same meaning and that it's tacky (or worse) to go there.My apologies. I meant to say "possible" there, not "impossible." At least we agree on something, even if you contradict yourself in the process.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
-The phrase "I could hurt you"
-Your full name and address If any of them said "fuck you if you think you can talk to me like you could hurt me," then perhaps I would. Good luck with that. Good luck finding a public official who would say that. To be honest, I'm not even sure what you're arguing about at this point. Yes, I know you're not. Are you arguing that "I will hurt you" and "I could hurt you" mean different things in a grammatical sense? Well, no, they mean different things PERIOD. There's no need to qualify it. My only real point is that they generally convey the same meaning No, they do not. Me: It is entirely impossible to imply something without intending to do it. You: False. My apologies. I meant to say "possible" there, not "impossible." No, I knew what you *meant* -- as it was clearly implied by the context -- and I was speaking to that. Maybe this will help you understand implications and intent a little better?
Pudge, I understood what you initially wrote. As I'm sure you'd agree ("This should not be hard for you to understand") your initial "I could hurt you" was not anything that was particularly hard to grasp.
I understood it and still found it childish, tacky, and depressingly out of touch with reality. You, who feel that you inhabit a reality in which "I could hurt you" is a socially acceptable thing to say to strangers, feel differently. We will probably never see eye-to-eye on that and should probably end this discussion. Good day to you.
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Shrug.
Statically typed? WTF man. If Chuck Norris decides a string is a Date, then _IT'S A FUCKING DATE_. Also, exceptions are not just thrown, they are kicked and punched also. This makes the language pretty safe alone.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Thanks, ScuttleMonkey, for posting that article.
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
The linked article or this thread?
That particular kind of anger is something I've seen before. It's when volunteers realize they really aren't getting paid. Or anything. I saw it in a volunteer organization a few years ago and it has a particular taste.
Mr. Shaw is in financial distress despite having written some very good software. The best financial strategy for open source contributors (besides being wildy famous) is writing books. Tim O'Reilly makes more than many good open source coders.
In addition, Mr. Shaw is facing a loss of freedom, going from free development to the corporate world.
Best of luck, Zed Shaw
I18N == Intergalacticization
I understood it and still found it childish, tacky, and depressingly out of touch with reality
Really? I thought it was hilarious. It was clearly a snark. You take things too seriously and should probably switch to boxers.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Zed has advice on how to hire.
Fred Brooks says that the difference between a good programmer and the next level down is a factor of seven. So, if you could figure out who is who, it'd be worth that much.
But looking at a resume isn't likely to do it for you. What you need to do is talk to the candidate. It's a touring test. In order to see if you're getter a good programmer, you have to be a good programmer. If you are a good programmer, you might not need a good programmer.
This leads people in the industry to stupid things. Employers who need good help have no idea how to get it. They also have no idea when they've got it. And, of course, you get people to exploit this weakness in the system. And there will always be companies that are willing to trade their reputation (which starts out non-zero, even though it's free) for a quick buck.
The good news for Zed and others is this: There are jobs out there for cleaning up messes. Some of my most enjoyable gigs have been mess cleanups.
I, for one, enjoyed Zed's rant. Nothing new under the Sun, but enjoyable all the same.
-- Stephen.
If Chuck Norris decides a string is a Date, then _IT'S A FUCKING DATE_. Also, exceptions are not just thrown, they are kicked and punched also. This makes the language pretty safe alone.
Huckabee's Chuck Norris module introduces five new types of cast operators: kick_cast, mis_cast, fucking_cast, out_cast, and orthopedic_cast.
Huckabee just acquired the pessimistic lock!
BI, business intelligence? ha ha ha
that's like slashdot editor
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
As far as I could tell from Zed's writing, it was his way of threatening to kick people's asses if they dissed him. It certainly seemed unprofessional.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
A lot of people on Slashdot will fly off the handle on this, but all-in-all, he's fairly balanced about who's wrong, who is balanced and what's wrong in the Rails community. He sets the scene as to what goes wrong when bringing in contractors, and how many in the Rails community have basically hyped all that to take advantage of the mess.
Certainly, he's correct about Rails deployment being unbelievable. I just couldn't believe it when I first got started. FastCGI was an unbelievable way to try and get something working, or not, and Textdrive's Apache handing off to local lighttpd ports is yet another recipe for disaster. Certainly, a web framework not being thread safe is unbelievable. Only Mongrel actually made it doable.
There's a lot to like about Ruby as a language and the Rails framework, but Ruby is more likely to be taken into the web world over the next few years by a new web framework or by something like JRuby. What he describes is spot on, and does not fill anyone with confidence.
"Rails is the new PHP" and people have been quietly removing it from their resumes for fear of being branded as beginners. But this guy can be dismissed out of hand by just reading the title of his blog.
The police officer, and all the lawyers are wrong. It's really very simple. It's assault when you take a swing at someone with the intent to harm them. The only tricky part is proving the intent. It's battery if you connect, and actually cause physical harm. A slap isn't battery. Now, the veracity of the US justice system is another matter. But they're having trouble telling the difference between marriage and homosexual relationships.
What do you mean? Of course they could teleport. I saw captain Kirk do it lots of times.