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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know what’s going on and, at this point, I don’t really want to.

In the past I mostly used Rails for quick proof of concept apps and also for teaching younger kids about web development at one point.

Rails itself has been fine, but there’s something about the community and atmosphere around it that is always steeped in unnecessary drama. This was especially problematic when I was introducing younger people to web dev and their first exposure was full of Twitter drama and the DHH controversy of the month. By now, I’m just so tired of it that I want nothing to do with Rails. It’s unfortunate.

I have no doubt that these individuals who resigned did great things and will be extremely valuable wherever they end up. I also don’t doubt that they had valid reasons to resign. I hope they find a better place to operate.

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I can't say I agree with your feelings with the rails community. I always thought it was one of the nicer and more organized ones.

Just to reiterate, the Ruby community itself is incredibly lovely.

Drama is bound to happen for a project that lots of people deeply care about. But this drama has never affected those of us who use Rails full-time and professionally, especially me. To be frank, you mentioned in a later reply: "I haven’t done web dev for a very long time" so your comment does sound like an overreaction.

I have used rails since 1.0 days and the drama has never affected my ability to ship. It is not as if DHH is posting dick pics to the edge rails guides. Don’t follow him on twitter and don’t read his blog and you would be none the wiser about his views.

Edit: I realized me posting this under your comment seems a bit belligerent. Not meant as such I just identified with your position of using it for work

>Don’t follow him on twitter and don’t read his blog and you would be none the wiser about his views.

I think that become easier as you age, but in the context of grand parents, new dev are bound to use social media and forums for help and info. And these drama will likely have an negative effect on them.

It might not affect the day to day, but with this many senior community members speaking up over the years, and leaving Ruby/Rails, I have to imagine it has stunted the growth and progression of the ecosystem.

When I look s as t the transformation that has happened to Python/Django over the last 10 years, compared to Rails, it does feel like it might be the case, although that’s my biased personal point of view.

Does Python/Django have working dependency management yet? It doesn’t as of 3 months ago.

There's a lot of different options at different levels of maturity, but fundamentally yes there are options that work well. I also wouldn't necessarily call Bundler a gold-standard dependency management solution, it's good but lacks more advanced features necessary for reproducible builds.

What? I've used Rails professionally for over a decade and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better framework for web dev that maximises productivity to get to a working product you can earn money from. You don't need to be involved with the Twitter aspect at all to benefit from the great aspects of Ruby and Rails.

I firmly believed that as well, right up until I learned that the broader web dev world wasn’t as difficult, slow, or unproductive as the Rails world had tried to convince me it was. I haven’t done web dev for a very long time but I still don’t have any issues dropping into modern non-Rails frameworks and being productive.

> You don't need to be involved with the Twitter aspect at all.

It’s possible, yes, but the drama has become so pervasive that it’s going to come across your feeds and daily conversations even if you don’t want to see it. It raises questions about the future of the project when it’s so bad that multiple core developers are resigning over it. But most importantly: This level of drama doesn’t exist in most other projects. Yes, there is always some drama and conflict, but something about Rails takes it to the next level.

I've been using rails more or less since 2014 and while there are other options for sure, nothing is quite as nice as rails in my opinion.

I honestly have never heard about any of this drama. I never really pay attention to any of that stuff and it never has affected me or my rails projects in any noticeable way.

I think this is a bit of an overreaction.

The community and ecosystem of any PL or framework is an important consideration for people needing to interact with that ecosystem in a long term way when pushing improvements or working with those in charge of governance.

A lot of people have loved rails as a project, but found important people in the community unprofessional for years - it's hard to want to invest in projects like that especially if its comparative advantage is claimed to be productivity.

The drama sucks, but I feel like there's drama in almost every dev community. I mostly just don't pay attention to any of it, because it doesn't affect my day to day usage of something like Rails.

I cant even record any drama from PHP and Python.

Guido van Rossum quit as Python BDFL over backlash on the := assignment operator. I'm sure there were other reasons, but it was a final straw:

https://hub.packtpub.com/why-guido-van-rossum-quit/

Not a rails person at all, but I could easily imagine rails being closer to a perfect storm than most other dev communities, with its unique intersection of tech deep-divers who reach their personal "peak surface" in rails and who might very well follow a torvaldseque "I don't care about the social, it's the technology that matters" and the socialiteism of more content/design minded people who reach their "peak tech" in rails. In my perception, creating a bridge between those two poles is basically what makes rails special. That's "rails' superpower". And with great power, well, perhaps in this case great drama?

And all the drama about Rails is the creator has nuanced political views... Better than most communities.

When I got introduced to web development, through Rails, the drama of the day was probably turbolinks. I learnt from our instructor that many people hated it, and we promptly removed the turbolinks gem from the gemfile every time we initialised a new project. I was far too new to go dig up controversies. I regarded names such as DHH, Matz, _why, Aaron Patterson, Jeremy Ashkenas, or Sandi Metz as so infinitely smarter than me, that I could not even begin to comprehend them directly.

I'm saying all this to point out that when someone is introduced to web development, they are often so awed, humbled and overwhelmed that twitter dramas are far from their minds.

Recently there has been some unfortunate drama with Basecamp and DHH but has the community and atmosphere around Rails always been "steeped in unnecessary drama"?

The only consistent unnecessary drama I've seen is that whenever Rails (or Ruby) get brought up on HN the conversation ends up beating the same dead horse about performance or "scalability".

> Recently there has been some unfortunate drama with Basecamp and DHH but has the community and atmosphere around Rails always been “steeped in unnecessary drama”?

I haven’t been engaged in the Ruby/Rails communities for quite some time, but, yes, way back when I was, that was a key distinguishing feature between the Rails community and the non-Rails-focussed Ruby community; the Rails community was full of drama.

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