Zed Shaw: Ruby Is So Nice

http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-12-24.html

by twampss • 18 years ago

78 70 18 years ago

tptacek4• 18 years ago

Litanies about the people Zed Shaw doesn't get along with don't qualify as Hacker News.

alex_c• 18 years ago

I just realized that Zed could be _why's evil twin. They're both talented, well-known rubyists, and they're both fascinating to read, even if you don't really have any idea what they're talking about, but they seem diametrically opposed in personality.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

Yup... here's _why's take on Zed: http://hackety.org/2008/11/22/runningHot.html

KirinDave4• 18 years ago

Especially wrong litanies. He likes to imply that the only people who call him on his attitude are biz people, as a kind of dismissive jedi mind trick. That's complete hogwash, a lot of engineering types and rubyists don't like Zed and have been fairly vocal about their disapproval for some time now.

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.

jd• 18 years ago

It's weird how so many people are so paranoid. Why is he coming up with these elaborate explanations of why they dislike him so much?

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.

fizx• 18 years ago

I forget, what was your mongrel competitor named? ;)

vegai2• 18 years ago

Well, given that Zed is a hacker, it's more qualified than some other things we see here...

tptacek4• 18 years ago

And your point is what?

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

Presumably most of the readers of Hacker News are also hackers, why don't we post every single one of their blog posts too...?

jhancock3• 18 years ago

thank you. Can people please stop up-voting zed posts. I don't know the guy and am not offended by his obvious attempts at sensationalist blogging, but I have yet to read a post of his in the last year that had any meaningful hacker content.

vasudeva• 18 years ago

Tech projects ZS thinks about: pretty awesome. :)

Social problems ZS blogs about: days of our lives. :(

look_lookatme• 18 years ago

What a bizarre, weird rant.

cosmo7• 18 years ago

Zed Shaw is the archetypal Rails proponent, and explains in full why Rails has such an uphill struggle to be accepted. It's as if being a Rubyist requires being a dick.

river_styx2• 18 years ago

Huh? He's all but sworn off Rails in favor of python frameworks.

mikeryan3• 18 years ago

Have you read Zed's Rails is a Ghetto rant?

http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html

pavelludiq• 18 years ago

I just realized I'm a Zed fanboy! Thats either really cool, or totally wrong, but i cant decide, because of his "so over the top" internet image.

amix• 18 years ago

Twisted by the Dark Side, Zed has become.

undertoad• 18 years ago

Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to blogging.

mikeryan3• 18 years ago

Its funny I like Zed. I think its healthy to have someone with his technical insight standing on the outside screaming "You're fucking DOING IT WRONG!".

Most won't pay him heed, but in some way the message gets through. (at least it gets decent distribution)

davidw3• 18 years ago

I'm disturbed by the thought that screaming profanities is the only way to get a hearing for your ideas, and would like to discourage anything that takes us in that direction.

old-gregg• 18 years ago

That's just how corporate culture works. I am more disturbed by sitting in meetings where every 10 seconds I hear "that is great" or "good job" while in reality the product sucks, schedule is unrealistic, salespeople are poorly educated on what we actually do here and half of the engineering team are incompetent idiots and sluggish sales are clearly suggesting that's not my imagination.

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.

neilc• 18 years ago

Most of Zed's rants don't have much to do with technical insight, and a lot more about silly personality issues and bickering.

cglee• 18 years ago

Absolutely, I love it that Zed is putting himself out there and dishing the dirt, but I'm also glad not everyone is doing that. It reminds me a bit of the Howard Stern phenomenon.

mmmurf• 18 years ago

That's a superb analogy :) Zed's a great hacker, but he seems to thrive on bitchy rants. He also seems to relish personal grudges, etc. I think it's entertaining and usually read his rants with a smile, though this seems to be his most immature yet.

dangrover• 18 years ago

He's like House.

andrewbadera2• 18 years ago

Except House is actually intelligent.

jhancock3• 18 years ago

I would be pleased to see detailed tech insight from zed or anyone else. Using the word "fuck" over and over does not qualify in and of itself.

qqq2• 18 years ago

poowsa was a troll that got kicked from the channel under several names. zed should probably have found someone else to quote...

zupatol• 18 years ago

I was puzzled by his claim that pooswa is french for pussy. It sounds more like good evening with a very strong german accent.

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.

qqq2• 18 years ago

only votes on the story itself matter.

epall• 18 years ago

Man, what would we do without Zed? I love this guy.

vegai2• 18 years ago

I saw Zed Shaw in QCon 2007 before I had learned that he was an internet rockstar. Frankly speaking, he seemed like one of the least douchebaggy speakers of the whole conference.

Sadly, he wasn't invited (or didn't wanna come) to QCon 2008. Our loss.

andrewbadera2• 18 years ago

internet ... rockstar .... bwahahahahahahhaah ....

unalone3• 18 years ago

It's a metaphor. It means that in the Internet world, a lot of attention is paid to him not just because of product but because of personality. Don't mock metaphors when they're used correctly, like in this case ("I saw him speak before I knew he had a reputation"). Mock them when they're ridiculous ("I want to make my website more 2.0").

Eliezer• 18 years ago

I can't even read this post, he's trying too hard to sound like Maddox.

SwellJoe• 18 years ago

And Maddox is often funny. The same cannot be said of Zed.

gommm• 18 years ago

I got intrigued how come I don't know about pooswa in french... Then looking at urban dictionary seems like they got it from the sentence 'voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir', which got transcribed to 'voule vu coche avec moi POOSWA!', so that's why the guy thought it meant pussy (never mind that the ce soir means this evening...)

Well, that's why one shouldn't always rely on user generated content :-)

mpk• 18 years ago

I like Zed. He writes some seriously good code, he answers technical emails (mine, at least) and seems to really care about his fellow humans (read up on past threads if you're missing this).

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.

nir2• 18 years ago

Zed did poke a hole in the Rails hype with his "Rails Ghetto" rant, and I think it did Rails nothing but good in the long run - this merger, for example, would probably never happened otherwise.

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.

jhancock3• 18 years ago

no, merb did the community good in the long run. ezra and team wrote good code instead of complaining. Demonstrating how a community can work well without ego was what merb brought to the game in a way that Zed had nothing to do with.

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.

nir2• 18 years ago

Personally I'm not sure, overall, Mongrel was a good thing. The Ruby web community should have focused on working well with existing web servers (mainly Apache) instead of building their own. Phusion Passenger is, in my opinion, the best thing that ever happened to Ruby in the web space, since Merb & Rails.

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.

jballanc• 18 years ago

Having worked in both Cali and NYC, I totally get Zed but at the same time understand how nobody else seems to.

Walk down the streets of Manhattan some time, and you'll realize that Zed's just speaking that particular dialect of the English language.

Prrometheus2• 18 years ago

I'm new to this whole Zed Shaw thing. Is there something to this than watching a guy act like an asshole while calling other people assholes?

llimllib• 18 years ago

who is voting this up and why?

sofal3• 18 years ago

Why do people see strength where there is only reactionary weakness? What is it about returning hate for hate that is so refreshing and liberating? There is nothing but waste on both sides.

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.

zby• 18 years ago

There is lot's of drama in it. But actually - those IRC quotes (if they are authentic) are really not nice. I think it is time that Open Source learned about culture - because the Wild West version does not really work for something that has cooperation at it's core.

Zed Shaw: Ruby Is So Nice

Related Stories