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

So what

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been saying RoR sucks for years. Where's my story?

Re:So what

[stoolpigeon]

apparently you didn't use enough profanity or brag enough about martial arts skills and willingness to fight anyone who disagrees with you. ramp that up and see what happens.

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.

Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[eldavojohn]

Before you spend the time reading this, let me point out that this isn't really technically oriented. I was hoping for some massive teardown of Ruby/Rails performance or load handling capabilities but ... yeah, didn't take away much from this other than this 'Zed' character can be quite abrasive.

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 ... just like bad people. What does any of this have to do with Ruby or Rails? Why are you so certain this is going to die? Because there are some idiots here and there trying to use it?

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.

Re:Team Dynamics Lead to Tantrums

[Anonymous Coward]

There were some nuggets of information hidden amongst the general whining though.

Things like having complained to the rails team about its thread safety and having the rails team stubbornly insist that it wasn't possible to make it thread-safe up until the point where someone went off and wrote a better version that was thread-safe. Things like that, if it's true, don't inspire a whole lot of confidence in RoR, regardless of how tactless the critique is.

Yes, he's got the kind of personality flaws that are, unfortunately, all too common in the tech industry. But I don't think that alone means we should automatically dismiss everything he says.

Still no job?

[jamie]

He sounds like a real people person. I can't imagine why companies aren't jumping at the chance to hire this guy.

Re:Still no job?

[AuMatar]

What, you don't like profanity laced rants aimed at you and your employees, from someone who obviously believes his and only his opinion matters?

Based on the writing on his site, I wouldn't hire him for anything. Even if he's a god among programmers, I can hire someone who's 80% as good and causes fewer problems in the workplace, and likely come out ahead due to that.

Re:Still no job?

[raju1kabir]

Too late, I already beat the shit out of Zed this morning. He was coming out of Starbucks carrying a Tazo Chai Crème and giggling about his new Hello Kitty cravat, and frankly, I just couldn't help myself. One open hand to the face, and he dropped like a bad packet hitting ipf, and then just sort of sat there on the pavement cringing and giggling. A couple girl scouts came by and kicked him in the teeth, then skipped off laughing as he threatened through a rain of tears to badmouth them in his blog.

Whose chopper is this?

[reverseengineer]

It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community.

Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.

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.

Zed Shaw: A master at self parody

[greg_barton]

I'd never heard of Zed Shaw before this story, but he will now be who I think of when the words "self" and "parody" are juxtaposed in my mind. To wit:

This means that thanks to Larry Flynt I can stab them in the ear verbally, insult them, question their sexual orientation, and say anything that's true and they just have to take it. Their only recourse is to write their pathetic little rebuttals in their stupid little blogs.

Obligatory pot/kettle/black reference.

I'll add one more thing to the people reading this: I mean business when I say I'll take anyone on who wants to fight me. You think you can take me, I'll pay to rent a boxing ring and beat your fucking ass legally.

O....K.... I think that stands by itself.

But wait! There's more...

I've been thinking this over ever since I realized that Mongrel and Rails more or less killed my career.

No, I believe you're doing that...right now...

Before Mongrel I was building kick ass software for the NYC Dept. of Correction with a tiny team.

And, based on the "beat your fucking ass" statements above, he'll be utilizing that software as a client at some point.

After Mongrel I couldn't get a gang of monkeys to rape me, so forget any jobs.

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.

Wow

[andawyr]

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.

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:It's sad that this will reflect on Ruby itself

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think this is about rails hype. This is the case of a prima donna who can't understand that his poisonous attitude is to blame for his unemployment, and not the community that gave him an identity as a useful asshole to have around. Meltdown. Move along, nothing to see here.

Re:Make the bad man stop

[Henriok]

Maybe I'm confused. I thought the little motto up top said "News for Nerds. Stuff that MATTERS." Who cares about this?

I care. Not so much in the context of Rails, Ruby or Mongrel, but in the context of being an employee in the IT business. Working in teams, working with excentric individuals, stupid bosses, geniuses, hacks, nice but incompetent, obnoxious but blazingly creative, hard working average joes, brilliant slackers. All this is what we all meet every day. It's great to hear these stories, since we all can relate to them, pehaps come to terms with our own failings and forgive the failings in others.

I feel for Zed, I really do. It seems to me that he's one guy who've been screwed one too many times, and breaking down is just too common under such circumstances. People skills, yeah. He might not have them, but reading a story like this makes me more proficient in that department. So.. I think it matters. It matters a lot. To me. To us all.

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).

Ouch.

[MenTaLguY]

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.

Tai Chi and Aikido as martial arts

[billstewart]

I actually do qi gong rather than tai chi, but they're pretty much the same thing. As a fighting technique, you can threaten the other guy with "Dude, if you don't back off, I'm going to breathe deeply and start moving reeeaallll sllllloooooowwwwww!" On the other hand, it's amazingly good old-guy exercise; I wish I'd discovered them when I was younger. Awareness of what your body is doing when you move can be really cool.

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.