
Zed Shaw: Ruby Is So Nice - twampss
http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-12-24.html
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tptacek
Litanies about the people Zed Shaw doesn't get along with don't qualify as
Hacker News.

~~~
KirinDave
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
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.

~~~
tptacek
I don't know, but every time he writes something like this, it becomes a
little bit harder to buy his "it's all an act" spiel. But he's not at all
unhinged! I mean, who are you going to believe, Zed Shaw or your lying eyes?

~~~
ambition
I've hung out with him in person. He is a nice guy in real life, though very
opinionated and with an overdeveloped sense of justice. He believes strongly
in being nice to people who are nice to him and the converse.

~~~
KirinDave
Anyone can be nice to people who treat you nicely. It's not exactly difficult.

Character is how you deal with people who aren't nice.

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ambition
I agree with you.

My point is just that there _is_ a drastic difference between Zed-in-person
and Zed-online.

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KirinDave
The last time I saw Zed in person was a bit tense, because he had threatened
to hunt down my friend Kevin Clark and start a physical fight with him.

He came into a lightning-talk session at railsconf, cut in line to talk about
his next project (Utu), and then left without listening to any other talks.

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mikeryan
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)

~~~
davidw
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.

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old-gregg
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.

~~~
sofal
While I agree with you that the corporate world is full of doublespeak, the
idea that politeness is inherently hypocritical and that swear words are
necessary for straight talking is, well, stupid.

~~~
unalone
Yes, but if your point is that something's hypocritical and bad, it's much
easier to say it rudely than it is so say it politely. Zed rants. I think if
he were to write more civil-yet-critical posts, it would make for longer, less
focused posts. Rudeness applies well in some situations.

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mpk
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.

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vegai
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.

~~~
andrewbadera
internet ... rockstar .... bwahahahahahahhaah ....

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unalone
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").

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nir
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.

~~~
jhancock
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.

~~~
nir
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.

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jballanc
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.

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sofal
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.

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

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

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amix
Twisted by the Dark Side, Zed has become.

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

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gommm
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 :-)

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pavelludiq
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.

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Prrometheus
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?

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look_lookatme
What a bizarre, weird rant.

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vasudeva
Tech projects ZS thinks about: pretty awesome. :)

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

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

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zby
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.

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llimllib
who is voting this up and why?

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

~~~
zupatol
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.

~~~
qqq
only votes on the story itself matter.

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cosmo7
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.

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

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

