Rails is a Ghetto (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Rails is a Ghetto (2008)

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31 pointsteffen20 comments

I disagree. This isn't interesting. This is tantamount to the trashy gossip rags at the cash register. It's just negativity that doesn't really add to the community. This should've stayed dead. I've flagged it to do my part.

Let's stay classy HN.

Stay classy? My friend, the H.S.S. HN Classy ship sailed away many years ago.

I really did enjoy your rant. It's very cathartic to read; I imagine it was even more cathartic to write.

Let's then bring it back to where it should be.

This was a very ugly moment of what seems to be a very ugly story. We should learn from it and try to avoid situations like this in the future. I'm sorry things like this happened and that they continue happening all over the place with people less vocal and with blogs less popular than Zed.

Zed... After reading this a long time ago, I was afraid when you approached the Python community. I feared something like this would happen again and I expressed my concern publicly. I am happy you proved my fears unfounded.

Oh there's similar crap going on in the Python community, but none of it involves me directly so I ignore it. However, if I find out about similar backroom deals and cons I'm going to tell everyone about it. I cannot stand abusive communities that con their members to make a quick buck.

I'm not a member of the community in question. However, I guess I'm just in the mind that if you have problems with a person you take it up with them directly and privately (including only the people that must be involved).

This was obviously a long time ago but things like this "public shaming" just seem like a one sided mud sling designed to call people out and make people feel bad (or give other people bad feelings about them) rather than a method to fix the problem.

I don't want to make assumptions regarding values. Maybe we have different ideas on how to combat things like these. Maybe, our views or very similar and you thought this was the only way to make your point. Either way, bringing it back this far from the actual event (Not that your did this) only serves to dredge up old animosity instead of burying the hatchet and "Getting Shit Done".

I think I'm more of the mid that the OP shouldn't be submitting what amounts to old gossip-y mud slinging articles 5 years later.

I think a major thing you're not admitting to is that most of these people and organizations were fucking people over, including me, and then using other's unwillingness to speak the truth to keep it all quiet. If more people outed these community leaders when they screwed people over you might not have this kind of thing happening.

What your sentiment does is simply perpetuate the situation by allowing bad actors in a community to use their popularity to harm individuals, and the individuals then feel like they can't tell anyone for fear of being a "gossip" or "tattle tale".

So, if my problem with someone is between me and them, then I do keep it quiet. But in this case, no it was not kept between us, many of these people actively slandered me, and until I spoke up they did it to many other people as well.

I must disagree. The discussions here on HN must be civil, of course, but posts like this and the community problems they are about still exist. We're not a big happy family and we have our differences and our own bad days. I've been less than the gentleman my family taught me to be more often than I would be proud of.

But, still, we can apologize, try to understand each other and learn from our experiences.

How come people take Zed's rants so seriously? Honest question, I'm oblivious to how he got so much credibility in the first place.

He's shipped a lot of useful code, including the Mongrel web server.

Among other things, he wrote mongrel, the only non-terrible rails server for many years.

This post specifically is arguable. But Zed's an excellent programmer and teacher. I even heard a first person account that he is a very pleasant guy.

Because I can write. Whether people love or hate what I say, I'm at least entertaining and informative at the same time. Even if my essays are full of hilarious bile I still make sure that there's a kernel of awesome information that's very true, or an informed opinion I can defend.

As for my credibility in technical matters, well I do make stuff people use, but more importantly I make stuff that helps other people be awesome. That's my niche.

Similar things have been written about IBM and others. Like what Cringely wrote about IT, IBM, and Memphis. For some reason, it's called "trashy gossip" when Zed writes it, but Cringely gets a bunch of people agreeing w/ him and providing insider accounts. No one ever seems to come and prove Zed wrong with facts of their own.

For example, no one seems to say, "Oh I was there, and the situation was way overblown. ThoughtWorks was kidding, never serious w/ its intimidation. And offering a junior sysadmin job to a real programmer applying to Google is just a starting point. It's not because of a screwed up corp. hiring process."

Not really. Developers get into pissing match, news at 11.

Rails is still a ghetto. Out of most programmers, Rails is the one with people with the least amount of CS degrees.

While there might be great rail programmers who know there CS basics. A lot don't

Well to be honest, there's a lot of people with CS degrees that don't know the fundamentals of basic CS either. I know, it sounds crazy, but you'll frequently run into people who graduate from reasonably top notch schools and have never heard of simple things like ternary search trees or suffix arrays, or even state machines.

In my experience I find that nearly all practicing programmers simply don't know a lot of important basics about building software or even how a computer works.

> have never heard of simple things

Or much worse: have heard, can answer questions about them, and still can't code themselves out of a paper bag.

I think because of the simplicity and approachability of Rails, almost anyone can pick it up and build a functioning website.

Rails is a niche that has a low barrier to entry. I doubt you can write an article that says: High frequency trading is a ghetto.

I have long lost count of CS masters that can't write 5 lines of code during a job interview.

Fair disclosure: I'm an engineer (I was trained to build computers instead of programming them). I've been programming professionally since 1987 and, among the top programmers I've met since then, two biologists, one engineer, one physicist, one ichthyologist and several ones who never graduated college, figure prominently.

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