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Dear Reddit, Hacker News...
- mixmax 18y agoAnd thanks for all the laughs Zed. We are looking forward to respectfully disagreeing with your upcoming intelligent thoughtful essays :-)
- vaksel 18y agoI actually liked the rants
- agotterer 18y agoA lot of them make sense actually. He has the balls to say what most wont.
- greml1n 18y agoon the internet. (though i agree with your agreement.)
- RobertL 18y agoZed actually says intelligent stuff but in a very obnoxious way. This makes him a "half-way Reddit". Because Reddit is a place where most posters say stupid stuff in a very obnoxious way. So, in a way, he was made for the environment. Sorry to see him leave.
- iron_ball 18y agoSo did he drop the persona at the end of the post or at the beginning? Because he still sounded pretty damn stern and macho when he mentioned tearing down entire language communities with a single post; and I've been on the internet so long I've seen the "ha ha you actually BELIEVED all the outrageous stuff I said loudly and defended to my last breath? Oh, you poor, pathetic saps. You poor, poor, pathetic, pathetic, gullible saps" routine a million times.
- gamache 18y agoTo me, it seemed like he did mostly believe what he said in his rants. He is only backing away from the ZSFA persona, not the things he said during his ZSFA tenure. As someone who's done time as a troll, I can verify that the persona can get pretty constrictive, even if there is a core of truth in everything you type.
- KirinDave 18y agoI can't bring myself to be uncharitable today, but I have to say I'll be very surprised if Zed stops writing rants. I am... very skeptical. I've seen this exact same drama played out on a dozen forums and community sites.
- swombat 18y agoFrom the sound of it Zed isn't going to stop writing rants... he's going to stop existing! I don't find that so hard to believe. Artificial personalities can get addictive, but spending time in Zed's head must get tedious fast.
- river_styx 18y agoJust out of curiosity... Based on your comments, there seems to be something going on between you and Zed. Was there some incident?
- thomasmallen 18y agoComment stalking makes Santa sad...
- tokenadult 18y agoHe has the contrast between Reddit and HN right.
- barrkel 18y agoYou're just flattered. :)
- derefr 18y agoHey, I read both (though I get annoyed by the redundancy sometimes--I'm considering writing a Greasemonkey script to display:none all visited link items.)
- begemot 18y agoThere are a lot of smart people on reddit, dons, cgibbard, sigpfe and slava_pestov to name a few.
- silentbicycle 18y agoWhile you're correct, I think the commenting and voting tendencies of the overall site population tend to drown them out. Intelligent discussions on Reddit seem to have a higher chance of being derailed by e.g. people posting 4chan cliches for cheap laughs. Of course, he's flattering us, and he got voted way up...
- unalone 18y agoYeah, we're kinda suckers too. I still think this site has more signal-to-noise than any other social news site except Metafilter, which is a good sign. I can still look at the top stories each day and find perhaps 20-25 that're worth at least a look, and 10 or so that generate discussions that I'm interested in participating in.
- silentbicycle 18y agoMetafilter has a $5 upfront signup fee and diligent moderators. I'm convinced that's ultimately the best way to keep out most trolling and other assorted malarkey.
- gaius 18y agoWho is this person and why do I care?
- fallentimes 18y agoAbout section: http://www.zedshaw.com/ http://www.zedshaw.com/ I don't know you well enough to answer the second part of the question.
- gaius 18y agoAh, one of those Ruby "ninjas" who think they're God's gift because they made a website. Say no more.
- bkbleikamp 18y agoWell...he did write Mongrel...so he's a bit of a "ninja."
- tdavis 18y agoI pretty much hate Ruby as much as any man can, but Zed has proven himself quite smart and capable, beyond "making a website".
- unalone 18y agoWhy, out of curiosity, do you hate it? You usually make pretty well-thought-out points, and I'm curious to hear the view of an anti-Rubyite. I just started playing with it and I'm liking it a lot.
- tdavis 18y agoWell, I have a tendency to be naturally adverse to anything that is incredibly hyped, so that should frame it. However, I have many complaints with the language itself and things surrounding it, so here I go, in no particular order: - I don't like the overall community. That is not to say I do not like Ruby hackers, period -- a number of my friends fall into the category. However, I do not like the general holier-than-thou attitude that much of the community takes and the fact that they seem to spend more time talking about how fucking awesome Ruby is than they spend actually writing code. In many ways the community is young and I believe it has a lot of maturing to do. Once again, this obviously does not apply to everyone, but one of the most important attributes of a programming language (at least to me) is its community on the whole. - I don't give a damn how "cool" a language is and this seems to be not only a general argument for it, but also a method by which many tutorials and other literature explain or introduce the language. - I am of the opinion that Ruby is far more ad-hoc than it is elegant, and I think many are simply confusing the two. Sometimes you need (), sometimes you don't. Some people think the lack of "unnecessary" parenthesis makes the language more elegant, I just say it makes it harder to determine if something is an attribute or a method, for example. I don't believe there should be 50 different ways to do the same thing; there should be a couple different ways and one of them should almost always be considered "the best". - What's intuitive for one person may not be so for another; it's not a universal thing and as such I do not find the language as intuitive as hyped. For instance, I find the following completely unintuitive: ['list',...]. each { |food| print( food.capitalize ) } Why? Because it looks nothing like a standard for loop. In Python, I can do a similar one-line loop over a list, but the syntax is far more intuitive to me because it looks like a loop: for food in [...]: print food.capitalize() There are class variables and instance variables and constants and globals and you define one of them using @@ and CapFirst for another and... it just feels like a cluster-fuck to me. - Despite all the Ruby community hand-waving about how "Ruby can't scale is a myth" and so forth, the fact remains that it is a (relatively speaking) young language which has many significant shortcomings -- shortcomings that even its own creator acknowledges. Except, many try to ignore these when they shouldn't. Do I think Ruby has nothing going for it? No. Do I think it has no hope of improving and growing? No. I do, however, believe that it has a lot of growing, improving, and maturing to do before it is even half as godlike as so many feel it is (or just feel they need to say it is). That being said, I don't think I will ever use Ruby -- for these and other reasons (this is already too long). I imagine I will at least be civil towards it... eventually ;)
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- Herring 18y agoEh, I don't see that reddit is worse. For one, this article isn't at the top of the programming subreddit. The comments here are better though.
- thomasmallen 18y agoI knew as soon as this popped up in my feed reader that it would be the top link on HN because it's very flattering, not that there's anything wrong with that.
- alex_c 18y agoAmusingly enough, a lot of Zed's blog posts never actually seem to be voted up on Reddit, and this one was posted and voted up here before it was on Reddit. http://www.reddit.com/search?q=zedshaw&sort=new http://www.reddit.com/search?q=zedshaw&sort=new
- tptacek 18y agoI don't understand why I'm meant to care about a troll promising to stop trolling.
- nailer 18y agoA troll is someone who's just trying to get a reaction, but hasn't actually contributed anything worthwhile. Zed has obviously contributed a lot, and was being trolled by the Ruby community (know what 'fuzed' stands for?) before he started ZSFA.
- unalone 18y agoYeah, and that's an important distinction, especially in cases like this. You can be pissed off and rude and not be a troll. If you do, the people calling you out as a troll are often trolling themselves, albeit more benignly.
- tptacek 18y agoWhen you write long-form blog posts that are about little more than the list of Ruby people that have offended you --- often writing about them for the Nth time --- I stop caring what your contributions are, and start being annoyed. Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more, but don't demand that I attend to their neuroses.
- nailer 18y ago> Whatever Zed's "contributions" are, there are 100 Ruby developers who have contributed more No, really, there aren't. Go read about Zed.
- tptacek 18y agoYou're joking, right? Name 2 developers each for the Rubinius, JRuby, MRI/YARV, and IronRuby projects, 2 developers from Passenger, anyone working on the Nimble Methods blog, anyone working on EventMachine, any 2 developers working on Merb, any non-37s developer working on ActiveRecord, anyone working on Ruby-AST projects, anyone working on GitHub and anyone working on Ruby git bindings --- there, I'm at 20, and I haven't even gotten to _why yet. Don't bullshit me. The fact that Zed talks the talk doesn't automatically mean he's walking the walk. He wrote a webserver. There are 100 Ruby developers who have written more --- and more important --- code than Zed, and I haven't heard about any of the crank calls they've gotten.
- trominos 18y agoOn one hand, I don't like to let myself be flattered, especially when I have no idea how sincere the flattery is. On the other: you like us? All right, c'mon, group hug.
- d0mine 18y agoBase flattery works. Troll and Man’s Man™ are different beasts. But trolling works too. I doubt that C++ or Lisp's success has anything to do with stern looks.
- nailer 18y agoAre C++ and Lisp successful? C++ doesn't seem so popular in the last decade. Lisp was That Language That Abuse Was Written In to a lot of people.
- d0mine 18y agoBoth C++ and Lisp are successful. Of cause It depends on how you define a "success" among thousands of programming languages.
- jbjohns 18y agoC++ certainly was popular, in fact the most popular by every measurement I saw back in the day. And he's talking about how it got there when it did, not today. I don't necessarily agree, but what he was saying should have been pretty obvious. :)
- Hexstream 18y agoHe said that Lisp isn't popular because it doesn't have the stern looks...
- d0mine 18y agoI should have said: I doubt that C++ or Lisp's success or a lack of it has anything to do with stern looks.
- pavelludiq 18y agoZed, i wish you the best of luck, and hope you find new and creative ways to wreak havoc on the internet!
- maurycy 18y agoBest luck, Zed.
- jcapote 18y agoI will miss the maddox of the tech community
- amix 18y ago"Zed's dead baby, Zed's dead."
- pmarsh 18y agoPerhaps I am too far down the ladder of programmers, but was I the only one who didn't care about the recent teenage prom queen drama to engulf the Ruby community? Good hacks continued to come out, the language was still fun to write in, and Rails and Merb continued to move forward. Perhaps I don't follow enough on twitter, or something. I get the sense enough energy was wasted in the past year to power several nations. Merry Christmas all, glad Zed is doing what he enjoys as always, we should all strive to live each day that way.
- muitocomplicado 18y agoI feel the same way. Being an outsider, who cares about the bickering between coding groups. It's still a nice programming language to code in and improve on.
- FraaJad 18y agoI, for one, look forward to reading about his exploits in the Python world. He has done some very interesting work in recent days using Python (vellum, SoS ...). Compared to all the drama that goes on in the Ruby (should I say Rails?) world, reading Python blogs on planetpython.org is a learning experience.
- davi 18y ago"Programmers will listen to people ... not because what they say is all that intelligent or thoughtful, but because they say it like a Man’s Man™." Yep. We are primates. Purely logical communication is rare amongst us -- a speaker's body language, inflection, status, and arousal level all affect how we hear what they are saying. People who do not respond in this way are considered weird; those who cannot, receive a diagnosis.
- joe 18y agoI truly hope that Zed has some "just fucking do it" left in him after the slaps in the face he's taken from some of the Ruby/Rails community. If he makes good on his plans, stops talking about himself, and lets his actions and intelligence speak for themselves, I'll gain a world of respect for him. Oh, and Zed: "Any more" is written "any more" when referring to additional items. "I will not write rants anymore" would be grammatically correct, however. Just a bit of constructive criticism. :)
- petercooper 18y agoStop giving this guy popularity! Merely breathing hot air and having a fiesty online "persona" should not make you newsworthy (although, sadly, it clearly does). He had some good points a year ago. Now, not so much.
- dangrover 18y agoThat was kind of the point of the post.
- jdp 18y agoAt least he had enough sense to give up the gimmick before it got old
- nonrecursive 18y agoI'm really happy about this. I heard about Zed because of one of his first rants, but after browsing around his site I found gems like http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html http://www.zedshaw.com/essays/master_and_expert.html . I'm really looking forward to reading more.
- gommm 18y agoYeah, when I first started looking at zed's website (around the time mongrel became popular), I really enjoyed his essays.. At that time, even his rants were interesting (http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/programmer_stats.html http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/programmer_stats.html). So thanks Zed for going back to writing thoughtful essays :-)
- michaelneale 18y ago"What you have witnessed is a year long proof that programmers will usually only listen to the man who seems toughest, not the one who’s most possibly right." I have noticed this throughout the years - there is a whole lot of testosterone around and it only gets worse. I like his mention of the OO book covers in the early days ;)
- SingAlong 18y agoAnd the letter to Reddit, Dear Reddit is his last blog rant :)
- theBobMcCormick 18y agoZed is such a douche.
- mhb 18y agoDoes this mean his site will change to something less contrary than white on black?