Re:Zed Shaw responds to DHH's Ruby Myths
by aaronblohowiak on Friday November 14, 2008 @07:36PM
(#365020)
I upmodded your post. DHH is an excellent marketer, and we all make honest mistakes -- I'd have to think long and hard about when I switched from SCGI to FCGI to Mongrel to Phusion myself. Zed is clearly inflammatory, which I think is a great detriment to the validity of some of the points he raises. Now that DHH has posted a clarification, he's maintained his credibility.
I've also gone back and re-read the original Zed rant and when he says "That’s a production application that can’t stay up for more than 4 minutes on average", it is clearly wrong (even according to the very conversation that he posted,) and he should issue the retraction, if he has not already.
Don't let it.
Put it this way, I'm definitely no unconditional member of the DHH fan club, but his contributions to the Ruby world are streets ahead of Zed's. Whether you think Zed is great or not, none of that detracts from what DHH has done. DHH is pretty direct and a "good guy" (usually - Rails logo idiocy overlooked). DHH has not, in my experience, tended to be passive aggressive - though there are many in the Ruby and Rails pantheon who are.
I concur with tptacek's opinion above - all of his posts in this thread are on the money. On ZS's part, as interesting and amusing as these cries are, he's crying in a showman-esque way - just sit back and enjoy the show. (Don't believe me? Try: The one thing that pissed me off about the Mongrel project was how it destroyed my career path. -- Destroyed his career path? It was a semi-popular project for a minor language - get a grip.)
My qualifications to make these statements? Not as strong as those for some others, but I've been a Rails coder since 2004 and run the largest Ruby blog so I believe I've seen a lot of what's gone on.