Zed Shaw: Ruby Is So Nice
zedshaw.com
zedshaw.com
Zed loves to be a complete jerk and then when people use the same strong language back at him suddenly write a blog post about how mean people are. At first I thought he was being deliciously ironic, but now I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
Is his reasoning really something like this? Biz dudes needs rails to be popular so that they can pitch ideas while being clueless, but Zed has made rails less magic, so now the Biz dudes hate Zed because now they have to have real ideas instead of buzzwords.
Really an elaborate explanation for simple name-calling. Perhaps the rude guys are just that - rude guys. To over-think it is nothing but paranoia.
I can see why someone, maybe a "MBA biz dude", might a tad upset about someone who goes out of his way to piss all over the reputation of Rails. There actually isn't anything wrong about Rails having a cool reputation if it is going be to accepted in an ordinary. working business.
Without ever having him, I am pissed at Zed because he has good ideas and he makes himself so hated that his good ideas will not get a hearing in an organization.
I mean, if he wanted to storm the Bastille and launch the Ruby-powered communist dictatorship of the proletariat, then his screw-the-biz-people rhetoric would make sense. But he clearly wants to conduct business himself while somehow not getting a clue that reputation is a part of business.
Character is how you deal with people who aren't nice.
It's amazing to me how many people have still not come to terms with that truth. It's written in the oldest books in the world. I think it's particularly apt for the Internet age when conversations with strangers happen regularly.
My point is just that there _is_ a drastic difference between Zed-in-person and Zed-online.
He came into a lightning-talk session at railsconf, cut in line to talk about his next project (Utu), and then left without listening to any other talks.
Yeah, FUzed,
It exists, it works, it's probably stable for things on the less-complex side of github (they had some SSL issues we've worked on addressing).
It's also about to get a big kickback from the Powerset/MS development on 0-point-of-failure deployments. That code is basically working at Powerset, and I can start to migrate it. I even have hours allotted on company time for it!
Most won't pay him heed, but in some way the message gets through. (at least it gets decent distribution)
I wish I had the luxury of hiring a contractor with nothing to lose, someone like Zed, to just bitch-slap these fake-smile wearing, strictly polite and always politically correct morons who are so full of this mandatory "positive attitude" that saying obvious things out loud had turned into a tabu. They use words like "good", "great" and "outstanding" so often that they lost any useful meaning. This is why you need to be Zed to be heard.
Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap" are essential to every healthy business meeting because the world is full of these objects and ignoring them or using some kind of cryptic doublespeak isn't helping anyone.
> Word like "shit", "fucking", "morons" and "crap"
... are indicative of a limited vocabulary and lack of imagination. Yeah, once in a while they're useful for effect, but if you use them all the time, they lose their power to shock, and you just sound crude and uneducated.
So I don't see why Zed should be called dumb, and I don't see why the parent comment was upvoted. Actually, I think it's perfectly obvious why it was upvoted -- I'm just hoping Hacker News doesn't turn into that.
It's his blog though, I guess he can do what he wants.
If you haven't read his lengthy rant on Ruby and the community, do it immediately, because I think that having context on Zed makes his writing a bit more worth reading.
However, I don't think that every item he posts on his blog is worthy of news linkage. Comments on stuff that someone said on IRC at some point? Ehhhh, colour me 42 kinds of uninterested.
Sadly, he wasn't invited (or didn't wanna come) to QCon 2008. Our loss.
Funny how Rails' actual value grew in contrast to the hype around it (a lot of it by the type he calls biz people - but also a lot by non-coding writers, bloggers, publishers etc) subsided.
There are many great hackers in the world. Some have written code that turned out to be critical to our everyday hacking lives. Zed seems to think that because he wrote one piece of software that has been used a lot (its really just a small blip on the "used a lot" scale) that he has the right to constantly remind everyone of this. Seriously, do the authors of VIM, openssh, firebug, etc... constantly remind us that we owe a debt to them by listening to their rants?
The bottom line is if Zed had not have written mongrel, someone else would. No hacker is irreplaceable.
I don't know if the Merb/Rails merger would have happened if the ego-inflating hype around Rails was still on. In that sense, maybe Mongrel's main benefit (IMHO) was that it gave Zed credibility which made his "Rail Ghetto" rant significant.
I agree everyone is replaceable, and yet - surprisingly small number of people out of those who have the skills to build such projects actually bother to do it. It's easy to know how to build something, hard to actually do it, from start to finish.
Walk down the streets of Manhattan some time, and you'll realize that Zed's just speaking that particular dialect of the English language.
Look... there will always be people spewing hatred at you. If you spew back, you have accomplished nothing other than to inspire more hatred. Maybe we think that's cool? Maybe if someone does it with style it makes it cool? Why is it that any other reaction that doesn't involve spewing hatred back get labeled as hypocritical counterfeit? Why must "saying what's really on your mind" involve some form of malevolence? Is that the only response that humans can have when insulted? Is it because it's funny?
If we are to keep HN a decent community, this kind of reactionary behavior should not be encouraged.
Well, that's why one shouldn't always rely on user generated content :-)
Social problems ZS blogs about: days of our lives. :(
I guess the slang meaning implies that you're a pussy when you say good evening in french, and what I took for a german accent is in fact american.
By the way, I don't think this is hacker news. I hope this comment doesn't help the post stay on the front page. I don't know how hacker news works. I voted up the comment that says 'not hacker news'. I hope this doesn't increase the score of the topic.