
Rails is a Ghetto (retracted) - swombat
http://zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html
======
bouncingsoul
I've never said anything about a Zed Shaw link before, but this has my hands
up in the air.

What comes to my mind is a fumbling art student who's been called out on a bad
piece, so he's now claiming it's a _parody_ of bad work, or, no wait, actually
the _reaction_ of everyone to the poor piece is the piece.

He trots out the persona argument all the time, but I won't give it to him. A
persona isn't a set of fake glasses, nose and mustache you can wear whenever
you don't want something attached to people's image of you. People with
personas make a great effort to separate them from their real selves – wearing
costumes, using different names, and actually behaving differently. Ranting
from zedshaw.com under the name Zed Shaw doesn't fit my idea of a persona.

Also, it bothers me that the supposed real Zed Shaw uses this deletion to
criticize people and put them down (for taking his "persona" seriously) –
something his "persona" was well known for.

~~~
neilk
The blog was called "Zed's So Fucking AWESOME", and he had his name in flaming
letters and silhouettes of strippers on the blog, as I recall. Did you really
think it was a sincere effort?

There may be a part of Zed Shaw that is Fucking Awesome and that is highly
opinionated (the audacity to even have an online persona, and to start
software projects, points to a large amount of ego). But it was clearly always
a self-parody. Unfortunately, self-parody doesn't work on the internet.
Everyone always takes you at face value.

~~~
bouncingsoul
Did you ever know a kid who would say something mean and then quickly follow
it up with "JK!"? That kid was annoying.

I _don't_ think it was a sincere effort. That's my point. Zed just wanted to
be able to say mean things about people and not experience any consequences
for it. And that's silly.

This fumbling around now is annoying. If he wants to be a mean person he
should be a mean person. If he wants to be nice he should say he doesn't want
to be mean anymore and be nicer. Changing his behavior and saying it's because
_I_ wasn't smart enough to handle his _persona_ – and by the way don't
criticize him for anything he said... What is that?

~~~
neilk
You have a point. On the other hand, people are contradictory. I think it is
quite possible to think to yourself "heh, heh, I'm going to create the most
ridiculously aggro coding blog ever" but in doing so also express the worst
aspects of your own personality.

~~~
bluefish
[tangent] Walt Whitman once wrote:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I
contain multitudes."

Always loved that quote. Maybe it applies here in a way.

------
michael_dorfman
Wow, Zed can't win with this crowd, can he?

I've never been a fan (mostly for the reasons he points to in this post-- his
works often read like "jock speech"), but I have to give him props for trying
to move in a different direction now, and own up to the negative consequences
of his earlier post. He doesn't want to be mean anymore (or pretend to be
mean, either), and I don't think that's a bad thing.

One small step toward civility, one giant leap for Zed. Good for him.

~~~
marksutherland
You know, if he'd actually done that, that would be fine. But in the past
month he's flamed the music industry after doing a piss poor job of
researching his claims then retaliated with a giant rant and personal attacks
when folk disagreed with him.

WTF are we still paying attention to him, and why is he still getting to the
top of the HN front page when he's done nothing of any real worth for the past
year, apart from the opinionated rants he himself has decried?

~~~
vjt
That's not true: he was able to write the right software at the right time[1],
when nobody else had will/time/whatever to scratch their own itch. The Mongrel
HTTP library is today the de-facto standard for running Rails applications,
and on it companies like Engine Yard based their business.

Like was previously said in this thread, he's a _passionate_ hacker, and puts
his passion on his sleeve. While I don't particularly appreciate the excess of
harsh in his posts, I consider it no different than Torvalds writing "You're
full of shit" on LKML.

The main problem here is about the "people" perception about whate they find
"written on the internet", and their constant need of finding an hero to
follow: in this scenario, if you're a respected and known developer, you
simply cannot ignore your influence on the "crowd" and you have to measure the
harshness of your writeups.

I think that the one that best described this situation was Antonio Cangiano,
on his blog post "Let's all grow up":
<http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/01/28/lets-all-grow-up>

[1] <http://markmail.org/message/g6e4loorw3p7plsk>

~~~
petercooper
_The Mongrel HTTP library is today the de-facto standard for running Rails
applications,_

No it's not. At least, not in this survey of 1100 folks who are deploying
Rails apps. <http://rails-hosting.com/Results/SurveySummary.html>

It _was_ the de facto standard, but Passenger has taken the baton in the last
several months.

~~~
Manfred
Although you're probably right about Apache + Passenger becoming the de-facto
for running Rails applications, I personally think that Mongrel is still ahead
by a bit.

The Rails Hosting 2009 survey shows that the test group uses Passenger more,
but the people in this group are not a random sampling. I would argue that
people ahead of the curve are also the people who find it inviting to fill out
such a survey.

------
fiaz
I really didn't care much for the original post, and I could care less about
this one too.

I DO care about any engineering accomplishments Zed has to offer (almost all
are great) - but that's about it.

~~~
andreyf
That's awfully short-sighted - no science is just about the accomplishments of
an individual, but rather the health the community, and I see this problem
everywhere. Even technical meetings are dominated by the most influential
person, not by the most intelligent argument. People have no idea how to
disagree - both on reddit, and in architecture meetings, ad hominem attacks
are far more common than logical arguments, and mistakes are made because of
it.

So although I didn't care much for Zed's original rant, this one, if it makes
an impact, might do more good to programming than all of his technical
accomplishments combined.

------
pavelludiq
At first I thought he was serious about the "so fucking awesome" bit. After
observing people like Linus Torvalds(and his "masturbating monkeys" rant) I
didn't feel at all that it might be a fake persona, it was over the top, but i
didn't think it was that much, when compared with all the other colourful
personalities in the software world. I want to thank Zed for reminding me that
although some ego in not bad, its not the thing to look for in a hacker, you
have to look beyond his "persona".

The "neon strippers" Zed Shaw was fucking awesome because he said "fuck" all
the time.

The "real" Zed Shaw is fucking awesome because he plays guitar, writes code,
does electronics, and is a nice person(sort of).

I knew this since I was a child, but I needed Zed to show me that
"masturbating monkeys" is not that cool, Kernel hacking is.

------
swombat
Original link, for the curious:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html)

~~~
andrewl-hn
I have a question about how the Web archive works: can Zed ask them to turn
down the archived copy and if he does will they remove it?

Does anybody know if Zed released his early blog posts under Creative Commons?
Because if he did anybody can republish his old rant today.

~~~
andrewl-hn
Oh, I just noticed at the bottom of the archived page: 'Licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution License.'

The new Zed's blog doesn't have a CC reference, BTW

~~~
jerf
You really shouldn't CC-license things blindly. They are useful, but not
appropriate in all circumstances. I see no reason to CC-license your blog
posts. (Copyright gives you no control over ideas and fair use means people
can quote you in most circumstances quotes are useful, so you're not really
giving anything useful away anyhow.)

~~~
wmf
I think CC licensing on blogs (or email) is a form of conspicuous production,
a way of signaling that you're part of the CC movement.

------
tptacek
Anyone want to take a bet on how many more times Zed Shaw can get to the top
of Hacker News and Reddit by talking about talking about Rails?

~~~
icey
You have to admit that he's a hell of a marketer. (In the PT Barnum sense of
the word.)

------
wallflower
Startups talk about hiring 'Rock Star' developers. Yes, he has created a lot
(Mongrel). But I think Zed is a rock star - because of his personality (even
if it's a facade of sorts - I'm not sure - without having dinner with him).
Whether intentional or not - it helps market his brand - reminds me of
Geoffrey Grosenbach and PeepCode (pimping out good screencasts..)

------
tjic
How to blog like Zed Shaw: 1) say outrageous thing 2) wait 3) retract
outrageous thing; criticize people / society / the world for getting all
atwitter over outrageous things 4) repeat

~~~
icey
What other things has he retracted?

~~~
tptacek
He didn't retract this one.

------
bluefish
Synopsis: he redacts the sentiment of his earlier rant but says nothing about
whether or not his opinion of the ruby/rails community has changed or why.

~~~
unalone
It hasn't. He's said that before, and that he's leaving the Rails community
behind rather than dwell on it.

------
cosmo7
At the risk of sounding vindictive, I don't think I've ever been more happy to
see someone getting PSAs on their Adsense.

------
nostrademons
Zed must've had fun writing this...

------
sutro
Zed's rails is a ghetto retraction is a ghetto.

