7 ms·

Zed Shaw responds to DHH's Ruby Myths

61 points by raju 18y ago

raju 18y ago
The original DHH post and HN discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362979 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362979
aaronblohowiak 18y ago
Wow! Zed's story is consistent and potentially damning. I look forward to DHH's reply.
- jm4 18y ago
  Yeah. The guy usually comes off as an angry lunatic but his posts are still informative. DHH, on the other hand, seems to gloss over details and his posts tend to read more like marketing materials than anything else. Although this little feud is getting old, I'm also looking forward to DHH's response. It will be interesting to see if his comment about Mongrel was simply an oversight or a cheap shot lie. I think it shows a total lack of class on the part of DHH to publicly speculate on a blog about Zed's mental well-being so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was the latter.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Be more specific about why Zed's post is "damning".
  - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    He accuses DHH of lying, and refers to an earlier (AFAIK uncontested) recording of the conversation to demonstrate his point. Edit: I agree 100% with jm4's elaboration down below.
    - twism 18y ago
      there... in context now.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - tptacek 18y ago
      You're using the word "lying" where "mistaken" would do just as well. To import the Wikipedia rule: (A)ssume (G)ood (F)aith.
      - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
        That's a good point. Which is why I said that Zed accuses him of lying, and why I said that it is potentially damning, and refrained from making a judgment myself.. and why I look forward to the rebuttal. Edit: please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365020 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365020
  - jm4 18y ago
    Did you read both Zed's and DHH's posts? Perhaps "damning" is too strong a word in this situation, but at the very least DHH is clearly mistaken. At worst, he is a liar. Memory leaks in Mongrel that were fixed in 2006 are the at the center of DHH's argument that RoR crashes are ancient history. Yet Zed shows that the application DHH is referring to that previously needed to be restarted 400 times a day wasn't even running on Mongrel.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      My read was that DHH was referring to leaks in the Basecamp code, not leaks in Mongrel. Was I mistaken? If so, my argument --- that Zed picked an irrelevant nit to derail DHH's argument --- pretty much falls apart.
    - ericb 18y ago
      It could be a slip of the tongue. It's easy to accidentally write mongrel when thinking and writing about "that guy who wrote mongrel." It is easy and more fun to assume malice, but honest mistakes happen.
- tlrobinson 18y ago
  He may have gotten it wrong that they were running FCGI instead of Mongrels, but I never got the feeling he was blaming Mongrel for the ~400 restarts/day. "But still an inconvenience, naturally. Nobody likes a memory leak. So I was happy when a patch emerged that fixed it and we could stop doing that. I believe the fix appeared some time in 2006. So even when Zed published his implosion at the end of 2007, this was already ancient history." I assumed the patch he referred to was for Rails, not Mongrel. And why would Zed make such a big deal about this in the first place if it were his own software's fault?
vaksel 18y ago
Anything you ever type or say on the web, will come to bite you in the ass eventually.
tptacek 18y ago
I did not read DHH's post and think he was suggesting Mongrel was leaking. I see that DHH screwed up and said Mongrel (which they were using in production, just not on Basecamp) when he should have said FCGI. But Zed has taken an entire DHH post, zoomed in on one irrelevant error, and attempted to twist the entire discussion around it. Let's settle it now: * Mongrel wasn't leaking. * DHH clearly appears to have misspoken. * But DHH also clearly said the leaks were in his application code. The rest of this post is just more-of-the-same drama from Zed. This time, instead of bizarro rants about Ruby security, or the play-by-play of the crank calls he gets, we get to hear about how Mongrel destroyed his career and how Rails will destroy the Passenger team. I can't see how this stuff has any relevance to me, as a professional developer, at all. If you can't make time to contribute to open source projects without screwing up your career, don't do it.
- jm4 18y ago
  True, it could have been an honest mistake. However, like I said in my comment above DHH starts off the post wondering aloud about Zed's state of mind and whether he needs help. Even if the Mongrel thing was a legitimate error the opening paragraph is an obvious cheap shot. Regardless of whether or not Zed just has an axe to grind here that kind of nonsense makes DHH look like a tool and a half if you ask me.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    You are missing my point. Zed just wrote a whole blog post about how DHH's "mythbusting" post was wrong. As evidence, he cited a factual error in DHH's post that was not relevant to DHH's argument. Logic seems to show how Zed was wrong. Innuendo and personality drama is all that implied DHH was wrong.
    - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
      I see what you are saying now, and agree (especially as DHH has issued the correction.)
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
rcoder 18y ago
"Mom, DHH called me a stupid-head!" "Did not!" "Did so!" ... Etc., etc. Honestly, neither of these guys need us feeding their egos. They've contributed some decent infrastructure for web hacking, but if they want to have a he-said/she-said argument, that's their business. I personally don't want to waste any more time on their little ego-fest. Let's turn this into a thread about Passenger, instead, since both of them seem to be blessing it as the next great thing for Rails deployment. Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage. That being said, once you get the thing packaged and installed (which wasn't as easy under Debian as I'd like), it does save a lot of resources compared to a Mongrel-based deployment. I've seen a drastic reduction in RAM usage, as well as a major decrease in the number of idle database connections lying around in inactive Mongrel backends.
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  We used Passanger at a place I used to work. We had some quirky mod_rewrite rules, but had no bizarre side-effects.
- jrockway 18y ago
  Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage. I hear it's possible to install it on a spare box and see if it works with your rewrite rules or not. Let's call it "testing".
  - Harkins 18y ago
    You've got a good suggestion, but why the snark? Did he need to be put down?
jrockway 18y ago
I've noticed a pattern emerging in the Ruby community. Everyone thinks everyone else "needs help". Zed "needs help". Zed's friend "might need help". The reason I think this is interesting, though, is because this behavior apparently rubs off on Rails users. I know someone who switched from Perl to Ruby (on Rails) a while back. He came back to the Perl community by writing his own super-great web framework. When anyone gives it any technical criticism, he immediately replies with something like "I had a friend like you. I hope you get help and get better." blood pressure rising In conclusion, everyone that uses Rails is mentally ill :)
- zby 18y ago
  Now, that was a cheap shot.
  - jamesbritt 18y ago
    Clearly, jrockway needs help.
    - alecco 18y ago
      And somehow he gets more than 9 votes up (because there must have been negative votes.)
      - jrockway 18y ago
        I'm pretty sure that is a joke based on the story I relate in the comment. But yes, I definitely need help!
        alecco 18y ago
        My head hurts from laughing so much...
        alecco 18y ago
        nooot.
tlrobinson 18y ago
I get the feeling that Zed is insecure about something. "Normally I wouldn’t give a shit. Ruby on Rails is so far from my world right now that I don’t even really care. I play guitar and write with maybe some coding to pay the bills and that’s about it." Man, Zed's too cool for Rails. He plays guitar. He doesn't care what those Rails people think. But let him post this one long rant to "clear something up"...
rbanffy 18y ago
You know what I love the most about Django? It's as easy to use as Rails, plus has no such toxic people hanging around it.
- kschrader 18y ago
  I was a Rails user for 3 years and I looked at Django seriously before settling on Merb for my current project. I wouldn't say that it's as easy to use or as powerful as Rails, but either way it seems like we should be moving beyond silly arguments like this by now and have started building the next generation of frameworks that take the good pieces from all of the current generation and build upon them.
- earthboundkid 18y ago
  Yay for Kansas!
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  That would all change were it to gain in usage.
dmh2000 18y ago
"To have everyone in your world using your software, but not offering you any jobs greater than a system administrator position is tough." this kind of refutes the idea that you can make a good living by writing an open source package and selling support for it.
- wmf 18y ago
  You can make money... if your software requires support/consulting/customization to make it work. If your software "just works", not so much.
petercooper 18y ago
That’s why they constantly pick on little guys like Giles, Obie, and myself Who's picking on Obie Fernandez?
kuniklo 18y ago
I wonder if it's occurred to Zed that his attitude might have had something to do with his difficulty finding a job.
fauigerzigerk 18y ago
Aaah we all love a good soap opera :-) But seriously, apart from that Zed/DHH warfare, I do wonder what Zed's experience means for the open source business model. To be honest, I don't believe that Zed is the asshole his tone sometimes suggests and that makes me wonder why he didn't get good jobs as the creator of Mongrel. That's much more interesting than DHH's silly lie. And Zed is by no means alone. I seem to remember that Guido Van Rossum wasn't paid for his work on Python for many many years, until 2005 actually when he was hired by google. (Of course I don't know whether he actually tried to get paid for python work) During all those years, python was one of the most popular programming languages. In the commercial space, someone who makes something as popular as Mongrel, let alone Python, does get paid more than enough for one person. Something's very wrong with this business model.
markessien 18y ago
...and that's why I picked Django over Ruby On Rails.
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  Zed wouldn't let you join his band?

61 points by raju 18y ago

raju 18y ago

The original DHH post and HN discussion here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362979 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362979

aaronblohowiak 18y ago

Wow! Zed's story is consistent and potentially damning. I look forward to DHH's reply.

jm4 18y ago
Yeah. The guy usually comes off as an angry lunatic but his posts are still informative. DHH, on the other hand, seems to gloss over details and his posts tend to read more like marketing materials than anything else. Although this little feud is getting old, I'm also looking forward to DHH's response. It will be interesting to see if his comment about Mongrel was simply an oversight or a cheap shot lie. I think it shows a total lack of class on the part of DHH to publicly speculate on a blog about Zed's mental well-being so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it was the latter.
tptacek 18y ago
Be more specific about why Zed's post is "damning".
- aaronblohowiak 18y ago
  He accuses DHH of lying, and refers to an earlier (AFAIK uncontested) recording of the conversation to demonstrate his point. Edit: I agree 100% with jm4's elaboration down below.
  - twism 18y ago
    there... in context now.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 18y ago
    You're using the word "lying" where "mistaken" would do just as well. To import the Wikipedia rule: (A)ssume (G)ood (F)aith.
    - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
      That's a good point. Which is why I said that Zed accuses him of lying, and why I said that it is potentially damning, and refrained from making a judgment myself.. and why I look forward to the rebuttal. Edit: please see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365020 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=365020
- jm4 18y ago
  Did you read both Zed's and DHH's posts? Perhaps "damning" is too strong a word in this situation, but at the very least DHH is clearly mistaken. At worst, he is a liar. Memory leaks in Mongrel that were fixed in 2006 are the at the center of DHH's argument that RoR crashes are ancient history. Yet Zed shows that the application DHH is referring to that previously needed to be restarted 400 times a day wasn't even running on Mongrel.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    My read was that DHH was referring to leaks in the Basecamp code, not leaks in Mongrel. Was I mistaken? If so, my argument --- that Zed picked an irrelevant nit to derail DHH's argument --- pretty much falls apart.
  - ericb 18y ago
    It could be a slip of the tongue. It's easy to accidentally write mongrel when thinking and writing about "that guy who wrote mongrel." It is easy and more fun to assume malice, but honest mistakes happen.
tlrobinson 18y ago
He may have gotten it wrong that they were running FCGI instead of Mongrels, but I never got the feeling he was blaming Mongrel for the ~400 restarts/day. "But still an inconvenience, naturally. Nobody likes a memory leak. So I was happy when a patch emerged that fixed it and we could stop doing that. I believe the fix appeared some time in 2006. So even when Zed published his implosion at the end of 2007, this was already ancient history." I assumed the patch he referred to was for Rails, not Mongrel. And why would Zed make such a big deal about this in the first place if it were his own software's fault?

vaksel 18y ago

Anything you ever type or say on the web, will come to bite you in the ass eventually.

tptacek 18y ago

I did not read DHH's post and think he was suggesting Mongrel was leaking. I see that DHH screwed up and said Mongrel (which they were using in production, just not on Basecamp) when he should have said FCGI. But Zed has taken an entire DHH post, zoomed in on one irrelevant error, and attempted to twist the entire discussion around it. Let's settle it now: * Mongrel wasn't leaking. * DHH clearly appears to have misspoken. * But DHH also clearly said the leaks were in his application code. The rest of this post is just more-of-the-same drama from Zed. This time, instead of bizarro rants about Ruby security, or the play-by-play of the crank calls he gets, we get to hear about how Mongrel destroyed his career and how Rails will destroy the Passenger team. I can't see how this stuff has any relevance to me, as a professional developer, at all. If you can't make time to contribute to open source projects without screwing up your career, don't do it.

jm4 18y ago
True, it could have been an honest mistake. However, like I said in my comment above DHH starts off the post wondering aloud about Zed's state of mind and whether he needs help. Even if the Mongrel thing was a legitimate error the opening paragraph is an obvious cheap shot. Regardless of whether or not Zed just has an axe to grind here that kind of nonsense makes DHH look like a tool and a half if you ask me.
- tptacek 18y ago
  You are missing my point. Zed just wrote a whole blog post about how DHH's "mythbusting" post was wrong. As evidence, he cited a factual error in DHH's post that was not relevant to DHH's argument. Logic seems to show how Zed was wrong. Innuendo and personality drama is all that implied DHH was wrong.
  - aaronblohowiak 18y ago
    I see what you are saying now, and agree (especially as DHH has issued the correction.)
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

rcoder 18y ago

"Mom, DHH called me a stupid-head!" "Did not!" "Did so!" ... Etc., etc. Honestly, neither of these guys need us feeding their egos. They've contributed some decent infrastructure for web hacking, but if they want to have a he-said/she-said argument, that's their business. I personally don't want to waste any more time on their little ego-fest. Let's turn this into a thread about Passenger, instead, since both of them seem to be blessing it as the next great thing for Rails deployment. Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage. That being said, once you get the thing packaged and installed (which wasn't as easy under Debian as I'd like), it does save a lot of resources compared to a Mongrel-based deployment. I've seen a drastic reduction in RAM usage, as well as a major decrease in the number of idle database connections lying around in inactive Mongrel backends.

aaronblohowiak 18y ago
We used Passanger at a place I used to work. We had some quirky mod_rewrite rules, but had no bizarre side-effects.
jrockway 18y ago
Personally, I've been nervous about using it in production, mainly because I don't yet trust that it isn't going to interact poorly with my rewrite rules and authN/Z setup. Apache configurations can feel a bit like voodoo even when modules aren't stomping all over each other, and the interaction of Passenger with mod_rewrite, in particular, seems like it could cause breakage. I hear it's possible to install it on a spare box and see if it works with your rewrite rules or not. Let's call it "testing".
- Harkins 18y ago
  You've got a good suggestion, but why the snark? Did he need to be put down?

jrockway 18y ago

I've noticed a pattern emerging in the Ruby community. Everyone thinks everyone else "needs help". Zed "needs help". Zed's friend "might need help". The reason I think this is interesting, though, is because this behavior apparently rubs off on Rails users. I know someone who switched from Perl to Ruby (on Rails) a while back. He came back to the Perl community by writing his own super-great web framework. When anyone gives it any technical criticism, he immediately replies with something like "I had a friend like you. I hope you get help and get better." blood pressure rising In conclusion, everyone that uses Rails is mentally ill :)

zby 18y ago
Now, that was a cheap shot.
- jamesbritt 18y ago
  Clearly, jrockway needs help.
  - alecco 18y ago
    And somehow he gets more than 9 votes up (because there must have been negative votes.)
    - jrockway 18y ago
      I'm pretty sure that is a joke based on the story I relate in the comment. But yes, I definitely need help!
      - alecco 18y ago
        My head hurts from laughing so much...
        alecco 18y ago
        nooot.

tlrobinson 18y ago

I get the feeling that Zed is insecure about something. "Normally I wouldn’t give a shit. Ruby on Rails is so far from my world right now that I don’t even really care. I play guitar and write with maybe some coding to pay the bills and that’s about it." Man, Zed's too cool for Rails. He plays guitar. He doesn't care what those Rails people think. But let him post this one long rant to "clear something up"...

rbanffy 18y ago

You know what I love the most about Django? It's as easy to use as Rails, plus has no such toxic people hanging around it.

kschrader 18y ago
I was a Rails user for 3 years and I looked at Django seriously before settling on Merb for my current project. I wouldn't say that it's as easy to use or as powerful as Rails, but either way it seems like we should be moving beyond silly arguments like this by now and have started building the next generation of frameworks that take the good pieces from all of the current generation and build upon them.
earthboundkid 18y ago
Yay for Kansas!
mattmcknight 18y ago
That would all change were it to gain in usage.

dmh2000 18y ago

"To have everyone in your world using your software, but not offering you any jobs greater than a system administrator position is tough." this kind of refutes the idea that you can make a good living by writing an open source package and selling support for it.

wmf 18y ago
You can make money... if your software requires support/consulting/customization to make it work. If your software "just works", not so much.

petercooper 18y ago

That’s why they constantly pick on little guys like Giles, Obie, and myself Who's picking on Obie Fernandez?

kuniklo 18y ago

I wonder if it's occurred to Zed that his attitude might have had something to do with his difficulty finding a job.

fauigerzigerk 18y ago

Aaah we all love a good soap opera :-) But seriously, apart from that Zed/DHH warfare, I do wonder what Zed's experience means for the open source business model. To be honest, I don't believe that Zed is the asshole his tone sometimes suggests and that makes me wonder why he didn't get good jobs as the creator of Mongrel. That's much more interesting than DHH's silly lie. And Zed is by no means alone. I seem to remember that Guido Van Rossum wasn't paid for his work on Python for many many years, until 2005 actually when he was hired by google. (Of course I don't know whether he actually tried to get paid for python work) During all those years, python was one of the most popular programming languages. In the commercial space, someone who makes something as popular as Mongrel, let alone Python, does get paid more than enough for one person. Something's very wrong with this business model.

markessien 18y ago

...and that's why I picked Django over Ruby On Rails.

mattmcknight 18y ago
Zed wouldn't let you join his band?