Predating the current hostile takeover: •••the vitriol directed at early critics like Zed Shaw •••mysterious departure of _why the lucky stiff •••the contentious Code of Conduct •••DHH •••uneasy truce after the toxic tribalism of the Rails vs. Merb
There's more, but the linked article can send you down more interesting rabbit holes than more bullets on my list
That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition and I don't view the Rails vs Merb period as itself having been problematic.
Merb devs believed we could make app development both simple to start (as a single file like Sinatra) and easy to evolve (into a modular codebase with Rails-like conventions). Existing outside of the Rails ecosystem allowed Merb to pursue that distinct vision.
The Merge between Rails and Merb, accreted many of Merb's modular architectural enhancements to Rails, but sadly deprecated the overall Merb vision. To me that was a shame, but I still wouldn't describe any of it as toxic.
It might be a situation where you see it differently because you were involved or benefiting from the way things unfolded
> That said, the Rails vs Merb era was mostly good natured competition [...] wouldn't describe any of it as toxic
Competition can be healthy, Rails vs Merb was anything but. Quotes from Yehuda himself:
••• "I was just so blinded by tribalism that I never even bothered to check how fundamental the disagreements really were."
••• "waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy"
••• "It's so easy for our brains to turn disagreements about priorities into value conflicts. It takes a lot of effort to see past that mistake."
Ezra's vision for Merb and DHH's vision for Rails were distinct. Both warranted development. Over time, I assume they would have collectively strengthened the Ruby community. It was a mistake for Engine Yard's management to have instead framed it as zero sum and forced a merger.
Discussing Engine Yard now does not seem fruitful if you do not address the quotes provided by Katz which refute your own prior comments
> There's been a ton of that, yes...
What are you saying - because some people got rich off Ruby, it's OK that those things happened?
Clearly not - Ruby will be lucky to have a shadow of the community left after this.
I'm on the record saying RC did a poor job rolling out these changes and treated the maintainers poorly.
There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave, which is terrible, but it won't be "the shadow of a community left" because there's way too many people who depend on it to feed their families.
In the world of "I'm sorry to that man" this seems like a given about literally everything.
Not knowing something happened is called being uninformed, and it doesn't change things or make the person right just because they don't know about something that occurred.
> There will be a lot of amazing Rubyists that leave
We agree. Listen, WebObjects still has a somewhat active community. Ruby's community won't be helped by recent events, but recent events happened because the Ruby community has been backstabby for a long time and no one has stopped it because there's too much money to be made in the meantime to care about things like people.
Maybe? This feels like an extreme statement with too much certainty at this point.
Some product surface area remains Ruby, but Ruby was chased away by most teams.
Square brought in a lot of Xooglers over the years to lead the transition, so you see a lot of Google tech: protobufs, gRPCs, at one point a pre-Kubernetes Borg clone, etc.
Zed was also a source of vitriol and toxicity, not just a target
Zed Shaw, sure, but that's a single person (though a very vocal one; I always liked his work, but he was pretty outspoken and that got under people's skin)
DHH - yes, opinionated to a fault and outspoken like ZS, prone to create division, but that was always more about Rails than Ruby (this is not a comment on DHH recently, which I know nothing about; I stopped being active in Ruby/Rails community over a dozen years ago).
Rails vs Merb - again I think you're conflating the Rails community with the Ruby community
Someone can shush away any behavior if they want, like you have done. Feel free to provide an alternate history or context for the current Ruby community upheaval if you want, but just dismissing the problems of the past doesn't help anyone.
> I'm not sure what corner of the Ruby world you've been hiding in.
I did say that I haven't been involved for the past dozen years. Before that I was definitely there when Rails burst onto the Ruby scene and its early years. I realize the overlap but they were still pretty distinct -- though maybe that's changed in the past decade.
I developed with Ruby from the beginning and loved Ruby on Rails for many reasons. The community's backstabbing nature and callousness toward people who put a lot of work in was not something I ever admired and it's led us here.
He left public programming, including Scratch, entirely.
Bad things happening to contributors year after year for a decade shows a toxic community that doesn't change even over a long period of time
The latest harm is just the continuation of what has been happening since the beginning
> some of which are well resolved
Resolved? Decisions were made, but the tensions were never resolved and people were hurt.
> He left public programming [...] entirely.
Yeah. That's what happens when someone is destroyed after years of their hard work is treated like nothing.