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Wow, how come Zed Shaw manages to attract so much hate? I have found his series to be absolutely delightful. Anytime something about him appears on HN I can be

Wow, how come Zed Shaw manages to attract so much hate? I have found his series to be absolutely delightful. Anytime something about him appears on HN I can be sure there will be users with ad hominem attacks like this: "> is this a joke? No, just written by Zed Shaw. Honest mistake though." How about you let go of the hate and embrace some love instead for the work this man has put forth? LE: For advanced Python you can read his code from the Lamson project. I am sure there are many other coders out there who are just as talented as he is but he takes the time to comment his code and also has a style of clarity so to speak. Thank you Mr. Shaw for your work and thank you to all of the amazing, talented coders out there who gave me confidence and helped me to learn.

austenallred 12y ago
Zed can come off as defensive and/or abrasive. If he disagrees with you he's not afraid to tell you you're an idiot, and if he feels like you're attacking him he'll tell you to go fuck yourself. He's also very, very staunch in his beliefs, some of which are somewhat contrarian. In an industry as opinionated and "willing-to-call-you-out" as tech is, that doesn't always win a lot of friends.
- EliRivers 12y ago
  I can't think of any industry in which insulting someone because you disagree with them will win friends :)
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Celebrity industry - it's the modus operandi of some entertainment journalists. Or, did I miss some implied sarcasm??
    - EliRivers 12y ago
      No sarcasm intended. I live a very sheltered life and in my circles, bad manners gets people cut off, ignored and relegated; certainly doesn't win new friends. HN is pretty much the only place I don't bother with manners. Does it win these journalists friends, or followers? I suspect the latter, but in the celebrity industry, they're probably the same thing.
- las_cases 12y ago
  > If he disagrees with you he's not afraid to tell you you're an idiot Honestly, I think this is the other way around. People get defensive and call him names when he is pointing clear mistakes / bad practices. Of course you get frustrated when someone calls you names and it's natural to pay them back in their own coin.
- ritchiea 12y ago
  Zed is abrasive, and I don't think I'm a particularly defensive or indirect person. I don't think the issue is that he's willing to be direct with people, it's that he's too quick to tell people to go fuck themselves. A lot of communication issues are misunderstandings and in my experience Zed would much rather tell you to go fuck yourself than listen and figure out what the misunderstanding is. The very best teachers and communicators I know don't hesitate to tell you when they disagree but would almost never literally tell you to go fuck yourself, they find a more polite route. That said, Zed seems like a good guy at heart, I have seen him offer help to people out of nowhere both here on HN and on Twitter. Not to mention making most (all?) of his Learn the Hard Way material for free. So while I don't particularly care for his communication style I don't want to distract from the fact that he is also doing a lot of great work that genuinely helps people.
  - zedshaw 12y ago
    You're conflating internet interactions with real interactions. I don't drink at all. Never done drugs and have never been drunk or anything. When I go to bars with friends I find that as the night goes on people become complete drunken idiots and are impossible to deal with. There's no polite way to tell a guy to stop talking to you about his chia pet collection or to keep someone from puking on your shoes or trying to start a fight. Best solution is to just not go to bars, which is what I do. If I need to fit in for some reason, I usually just pretend I'm kind of drunk like everyone else, which I haven't done since I was in my early 20s. Twitter, these HN comments, IRC, the whole internet is like a massive bar full of drunk idiots. Especially toward the end of the day. Something about the internet makes people turn off their rational mind and just spew hate, stupidity, propaganda, and lies. In this case, it's the same interactions and I get tired of it. You can't tell a belligerent drunk to politely stop smashing your car any more than you can tell a belligerent twitter user to stop talking to you. So, your comment amounts to judging my interactions with people professionally based on my interactions a bunch of drunk idiots at a bar. Nobody is a saint, and expecting me or anyone else to take abuse and poor behavior like Jesus before you'll think they're a good person is wrong. And, the fact that you are actually spending your morning (day/night) telling people how I'm a fucked up asshole because of how I deal with fucked up assholes kind of says more about you than me.
aikah 12y ago
Didn't he get a lot of heat when he was a rubyist because of his rants or something , or maybe I'm mixing things up,in that case never mind.
- locusm 12y ago
  "Rails is a ghetto" is what you're looking for. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto
lmm 12y ago
He's arrogant and rude about it, which is bad enough when someone is right and worse when they're wrong and trying to teach beginners. In particular he doesn't understand object oriented programming (look at the piece he wrote about .each vs for in ruby), but is too arrogant to realise that there's something he's missing, so he goes on these sweary rants about how OOP is nonsense/useless/evil/what have you. In any programmer that would be bad. In someone who purports to teach beginners it's disastrous.
- las_cases 12y ago
  I have no idea what are you talking about regarding OOP issues. From the Lamson project you can see he is using OOP. Also, how and when is he arrogant? When he is being called names over and over? And just now you've insulted him saying he doesn't understand OOP. You know Linus Torvalds is not very fond of OOP as well, right? Always use OOP where it makes sense. I don't think he ever argued that.
  - lmm 12y ago
    > And just now you've insulted him saying he doesn't understand OOP. The laws of politeness are like the laws of war: once you violate them you forfeit their protection. > You know Linus Torvalds is not very fond of OOP as well, right? I would emphatically advise beginners not to listen to Linus Torvalds, and be very concerned if he started writing programming tutorials for beginners. > Always use OOP where it makes sense. I don't think he ever argued that. I'm thinking specifically of http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html as that was where I first encountered him. This article is a) something he wrote by himself, not in response to being called names b) self-confident and abrasive in a way that I think it is fair to describe as "arrogant" c) wrong, in a way that seems to reflect not understanding polymorphism - particularly given his replies in the HN discussion of that piece.
    - gareim 12y ago
      I just read the each vs for part and I don't see anything wrong with it. He's saying it's easier for beginners to grasp the for loop and it's also a pretty universal loop. What's wrong with what he said?
nailer 12y ago
Zed had a satirical site called "Zed's so fucking awesome" mocking the whole 'Ruby rockstar' thing in the late 2000s. A bunch of people didn't get the joke and got really angry at Zed. [1] Zed also pointed out some genuinely bad stuff that was happening in the rails community in: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto which made them more angry. Edit: a user points out below that post came before the ZSFA site. I'm not sure that matters. He also claimed Ryan Dahl ripped off Mongrel's HTTP parser. The flip side of this (which I've heard from someone else involved in node) is that Ryan Dahl is super talented and just read the damn HTTP spec like Zed did. I honestly don't know enough about HTTP parsers to say either way. Zed's talented: Mongrel and Lamson are in the top of their categories. Learn C The Hard Way is a modern, but still fundamental C book. Any interaction with Zed I've ever had has been brilliant. [1] The people who got angry at ZSFA in the late 2000s are probably the same people who write Jenn Schiffer angry tweets for writing tech satire these days.
- 3pt14159 12y ago
  That site existed way before Ruby rockstars. I remember reading it in high school. It was priceless.
- knowtheory 12y ago
  re [1]: This is not an accurate reflection of the events and circumstances at the time. The "Zed's so fucking awesome" follows the Rails is a Ghetto post, and the start of acrimony between Zed and other members of the Rails community, and so was more of a consequence of the aforementioned acrimony than it was the cause.
  - nailer 12y ago
    Sure. Amended, though I don't think it makes that much of a difference.
    - knowtheory 12y ago
      It does make a difference because Jenn's rise to general attention has been through her satirical and artistic work (as well as the fact that she's an awesome developer who worked at the NBA and now works for Bocoup). The context in which everyone was relating to Zed was the dude who wrote mongrel who did an about face and not only left the ruby community but decried it all the way out. Remember this was in the heyday of Ruby on Rails's rise, twitter was still using mongrel as their primary web serving mechanism.
cheetos 12y ago
You should consider if there may be a good reason why he attracts so much hate. I have found him to be contrarian and rude for the sake of being contrarian and rude. To me, his behavior represents the worst of the archetypal 'rockstar' programmers I have worked with -- perhaps more skilled than the average, but full of himself, unreasonably mean and impossible to collaborate or work with. I have watched this kind of attitude destroy teams and companies and I prefer not to condone it. There are plenty of people much more talented than him who are capable of providing feedback without seemingly delighting in being an asshole.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  We should be able to evaluate a book, a finished product, irrespective of its author. It is not acceptable to diss a body of work because the author is "contrarian and rude for the sake of being contrarian and rude". Either the book is good, or it isn't. It stands on its own. I am a stranger to this feud, and knew nothing about Zed Shaw to this day. I have no chips in this discussion. The opinion I express is more of a generic attitude on life.
  - dalke 12y ago
    I see no reason to accept your strict view of aesthetic interpretation. Borge's 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' gives a perhaps exaggerated but definitely interesting example of how context can be relevant. Consider the message "NUTS". It was a "legend of World War II" on the US side. (Quoting from https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XxAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CJsEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7352%2C2890400 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XxAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CJsE... .) It clearly does not stand on its own. Without knowing the author, or the context, it's impossible to explain why that message resonated so deeply. (Eg, I seem to recall it being reappropriated in one of the early Star Trek novels.) The message metadata gives some idea of the context: December 22, 1944 To the German Commander, N U T S ! The American Commander and the larger situation is http://www.army.mil/article/92856 http://www.army.mil/article/92856 . Even then one wonders why General McAuliffe said "nuts" and not stronger invective. His Wikipedia entry says he was one of the few generals who did not use profane language, which lends some flavor to understanding that word choice. If I write "NUTS" here, does it have the same meaning and interpretation as when McAuliffe wrote it some 70 years ago? Assuredly not.
forgottenpass 12y ago
How about you let go of the hate and embrace some love instead for the work this man has put forth? I've seen enough of these threads on Hacker News to know the answer is clearly "it's different because I don't like him." Zed wounded a lot of egos back in the day, so calls for positivity that may otherwise work on HN are going to fail. By framing him as a "controversial figure" they attempt to create a route to hate on him that doesn't count as shit talking.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I've seen enough of these threads on Hacker News to know the answer is clearly "it's different because I don't like him." Zed wounded a lot of egos back in the day, so calls for positivity that may otherwise work on HN are going to fail. By framing him as a "controversial figure" they attempt to create a route to hate on him that doesn't count as shit talking. I don't know of anyone else in tech who's had that experience, ha.
puranjay 12y ago
I'm merely commenting on the quality of the course, not the course creator. I found this course useful. But not as useful as some others. Learning the basics were easy enough, but Zed kinda tripped over with the harder topics such as OOP. Overall, it's a good place to start programming if you've never done it before, but you will need to look elsewhere for clarity if you want to make sense of anything beyond If-Then statements and while/for loops
anon1385 12y ago
As somebody who doesn't know Python I would never use this book or recommend it to others. The reason for that is nothing to do with drama over Ruby (which I don't know either) but purely because of the quality of his other work about languages that I do know. In particular his C book and his comments about C on this site. Anybody who knows C should read this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834869 The take aways are that Zed doesn't understand C and hasn't read the C standard. He even takes pride in his lack of knowledge of the fundamental concepts that you need to understand to write correct C, and mocks those who do take the time to learn about the standard. Such a person should not be writing a book to teach C to beginners. People following his advice are going to write code that is dangerously incorrect. (If you want to take the position that C is insane and nobody should use it then that is fair enough and hard to disagree with, but in that case the honest thing to do is to encourage people not to use C; don't write a book teaching dangerous practices to beginners). Since I don't know Python I have no way to know if he takes a similar attitude towards Python. What aspects of the language does he ignore because he is too prideful to read the standards or documentation? Given what I know about his attitude towards C, I can't trust him to teach me the things I would need to know to use Python correctly and safely.
- teach 12y ago
  Your dismissal of his Python material is unfounded. This book is quite good, especially for beginners that literally would be unable to learn to code otherwise. As a professional educator myself, I strongly disagree with your sentiment about "teaching dangerous practices to beginners". By far, the biggest "danger" to beginners is that they won't learn how to code at all or get frustrated and quit because of pedants. Do we teach beginning drivers using 18-wheeled tractor trailers? Or using F-15 fighter jets? No, we use cars with automatic shifting driving around in an empty parking lot at first.
  - rifung 12y ago
    I don't think your analogy really makes sense; the issue isn't that the author tries to teach people things which are too difficult to handle but that the author may state things which are just incorrect. A better analogy would be teaching beginning drivers to use their knees instead of hands to drive. I suppose I'm in a different position than you though; I don't see any need to get everyone to start coding. I think if people want to code there are already good books out there, and if they don't then I don't think we need more developers who hate their job.
makeitsuckless 12y ago
He had the gall to criticize the Ruby on Rails community when RoR was still considered sacred (I believe that honeymoon is pretty much over now) in the hipster coding circles that form a considerable and certainly very vocal part of HN. Also, the puritanical American allergy for "profanity" under the thing guise of "professionalism" doesn't mix well with mr. Shaw's somewhat direct methods of communicating.
michaelochurch 12y ago
How about you let go of the hate and embrace some love instead for the work this man has put forth? I'm with you. The man cares and, for all of his supposed abrasiveness, he's a good communicator. He's smart and he's not afraid to bring out the honest truth (e.g. "Programming, motherfucker") about an issue.
drobati 12y ago
I met Zed Shaw in Atlanta during PyCon 2011 and I thought he was a pretty nice guy. People hate his opinions but the hate is unjustified.
jackmaney 12y ago
Honestly, I have no idea where this hatred of Zed Shaw comes from. Yes, the man is opinionated, but he's no more of an asshole about it than most people (which is to say, not much of an asshole at all).

austenallred 12y ago

Zed can come off as defensive and/or abrasive. If he disagrees with you he's not afraid to tell you you're an idiot, and if he feels like you're attacking him he'll tell you to go fuck yourself. He's also very, very staunch in his beliefs, some of which are somewhat contrarian. In an industry as opinionated and "willing-to-call-you-out" as tech is, that doesn't always win a lot of friends.

EliRivers 12y ago
I can't think of any industry in which insulting someone because you disagree with them will win friends :)
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Celebrity industry - it's the modus operandi of some entertainment journalists. Or, did I miss some implied sarcasm??
  - EliRivers 12y ago
    No sarcasm intended. I live a very sheltered life and in my circles, bad manners gets people cut off, ignored and relegated; certainly doesn't win new friends. HN is pretty much the only place I don't bother with manners. Does it win these journalists friends, or followers? I suspect the latter, but in the celebrity industry, they're probably the same thing.
las_cases 12y ago
> If he disagrees with you he's not afraid to tell you you're an idiot Honestly, I think this is the other way around. People get defensive and call him names when he is pointing clear mistakes / bad practices. Of course you get frustrated when someone calls you names and it's natural to pay them back in their own coin.
ritchiea 12y ago
Zed is abrasive, and I don't think I'm a particularly defensive or indirect person. I don't think the issue is that he's willing to be direct with people, it's that he's too quick to tell people to go fuck themselves. A lot of communication issues are misunderstandings and in my experience Zed would much rather tell you to go fuck yourself than listen and figure out what the misunderstanding is. The very best teachers and communicators I know don't hesitate to tell you when they disagree but would almost never literally tell you to go fuck yourself, they find a more polite route. That said, Zed seems like a good guy at heart, I have seen him offer help to people out of nowhere both here on HN and on Twitter. Not to mention making most (all?) of his Learn the Hard Way material for free. So while I don't particularly care for his communication style I don't want to distract from the fact that he is also doing a lot of great work that genuinely helps people.
- zedshaw 12y ago
  You're conflating internet interactions with real interactions. I don't drink at all. Never done drugs and have never been drunk or anything. When I go to bars with friends I find that as the night goes on people become complete drunken idiots and are impossible to deal with. There's no polite way to tell a guy to stop talking to you about his chia pet collection or to keep someone from puking on your shoes or trying to start a fight. Best solution is to just not go to bars, which is what I do. If I need to fit in for some reason, I usually just pretend I'm kind of drunk like everyone else, which I haven't done since I was in my early 20s. Twitter, these HN comments, IRC, the whole internet is like a massive bar full of drunk idiots. Especially toward the end of the day. Something about the internet makes people turn off their rational mind and just spew hate, stupidity, propaganda, and lies. In this case, it's the same interactions and I get tired of it. You can't tell a belligerent drunk to politely stop smashing your car any more than you can tell a belligerent twitter user to stop talking to you. So, your comment amounts to judging my interactions with people professionally based on my interactions a bunch of drunk idiots at a bar. Nobody is a saint, and expecting me or anyone else to take abuse and poor behavior like Jesus before you'll think they're a good person is wrong. And, the fact that you are actually spending your morning (day/night) telling people how I'm a fucked up asshole because of how I deal with fucked up assholes kind of says more about you than me.

aikah 12y ago

Didn't he get a lot of heat when he was a rubyist because of his rants or something , or maybe I'm mixing things up,in that case never mind.

locusm 12y ago
"Rails is a ghetto" is what you're looking for. http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto

lmm 12y ago

He's arrogant and rude about it, which is bad enough when someone is right and worse when they're wrong and trying to teach beginners. In particular he doesn't understand object oriented programming (look at the piece he wrote about .each vs for in ruby), but is too arrogant to realise that there's something he's missing, so he goes on these sweary rants about how OOP is nonsense/useless/evil/what have you. In any programmer that would be bad. In someone who purports to teach beginners it's disastrous.

las_cases 12y ago
I have no idea what are you talking about regarding OOP issues. From the Lamson project you can see he is using OOP. Also, how and when is he arrogant? When he is being called names over and over? And just now you've insulted him saying he doesn't understand OOP. You know Linus Torvalds is not very fond of OOP as well, right? Always use OOP where it makes sense. I don't think he ever argued that.
- lmm 12y ago
  > And just now you've insulted him saying he doesn't understand OOP. The laws of politeness are like the laws of war: once you violate them you forfeit their protection. > You know Linus Torvalds is not very fond of OOP as well, right? I would emphatically advise beginners not to listen to Linus Torvalds, and be very concerned if he started writing programming tutorials for beginners. > Always use OOP where it makes sense. I don't think he ever argued that. I'm thinking specifically of http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html as that was where I first encountered him. This article is a) something he wrote by himself, not in response to being called names b) self-confident and abrasive in a way that I think it is fair to describe as "arrogant" c) wrong, in a way that seems to reflect not understanding polymorphism - particularly given his replies in the HN discussion of that piece.
  - gareim 12y ago
    I just read the each vs for part and I don't see anything wrong with it. He's saying it's easier for beginners to grasp the for loop and it's also a pretty universal loop. What's wrong with what he said?

nailer 12y ago

Zed had a satirical site called "Zed's so fucking awesome" mocking the whole 'Ruby rockstar' thing in the late 2000s. A bunch of people didn't get the joke and got really angry at Zed. [1] Zed also pointed out some genuinely bad stuff that was happening in the rails community in: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ruby/rails/is-a-ghetto which made them more angry. Edit: a user points out below that post came before the ZSFA site. I'm not sure that matters. He also claimed Ryan Dahl ripped off Mongrel's HTTP parser. The flip side of this (which I've heard from someone else involved in node) is that Ryan Dahl is super talented and just read the damn HTTP spec like Zed did. I honestly don't know enough about HTTP parsers to say either way. Zed's talented: Mongrel and Lamson are in the top of their categories. Learn C The Hard Way is a modern, but still fundamental C book. Any interaction with Zed I've ever had has been brilliant. [1] The people who got angry at ZSFA in the late 2000s are probably the same people who write Jenn Schiffer angry tweets for writing tech satire these days.

3pt14159 12y ago
That site existed way before Ruby rockstars. I remember reading it in high school. It was priceless.
knowtheory 12y ago
re [1]: This is not an accurate reflection of the events and circumstances at the time. The "Zed's so fucking awesome" follows the Rails is a Ghetto post, and the start of acrimony between Zed and other members of the Rails community, and so was more of a consequence of the aforementioned acrimony than it was the cause.
- nailer 12y ago
  Sure. Amended, though I don't think it makes that much of a difference.
  - knowtheory 12y ago
    It does make a difference because Jenn's rise to general attention has been through her satirical and artistic work (as well as the fact that she's an awesome developer who worked at the NBA and now works for Bocoup). The context in which everyone was relating to Zed was the dude who wrote mongrel who did an about face and not only left the ruby community but decried it all the way out. Remember this was in the heyday of Ruby on Rails's rise, twitter was still using mongrel as their primary web serving mechanism.

cheetos 12y ago

You should consider if there may be a good reason why he attracts so much hate. I have found him to be contrarian and rude for the sake of being contrarian and rude. To me, his behavior represents the worst of the archetypal 'rockstar' programmers I have worked with -- perhaps more skilled than the average, but full of himself, unreasonably mean and impossible to collaborate or work with. I have watched this kind of attitude destroy teams and companies and I prefer not to condone it. There are plenty of people much more talented than him who are capable of providing feedback without seemingly delighting in being an asshole.

sergiosgc 12y ago
We should be able to evaluate a book, a finished product, irrespective of its author. It is not acceptable to diss a body of work because the author is "contrarian and rude for the sake of being contrarian and rude". Either the book is good, or it isn't. It stands on its own. I am a stranger to this feud, and knew nothing about Zed Shaw to this day. I have no chips in this discussion. The opinion I express is more of a generic attitude on life.
- dalke 12y ago
  I see no reason to accept your strict view of aesthetic interpretation. Borge's 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' gives a perhaps exaggerated but definitely interesting example of how context can be relevant. Consider the message "NUTS". It was a "legend of World War II" on the US side. (Quoting from https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XxAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CJsEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7352%2C2890400 https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XxAdAAAAIBAJ&sjid=CJsE... .) It clearly does not stand on its own. Without knowing the author, or the context, it's impossible to explain why that message resonated so deeply. (Eg, I seem to recall it being reappropriated in one of the early Star Trek novels.) The message metadata gives some idea of the context: December 22, 1944 To the German Commander, N U T S ! The American Commander and the larger situation is http://www.army.mil/article/92856 http://www.army.mil/article/92856 . Even then one wonders why General McAuliffe said "nuts" and not stronger invective. His Wikipedia entry says he was one of the few generals who did not use profane language, which lends some flavor to understanding that word choice. If I write "NUTS" here, does it have the same meaning and interpretation as when McAuliffe wrote it some 70 years ago? Assuredly not.

forgottenpass 12y ago

How about you let go of the hate and embrace some love instead for the work this man has put forth? I've seen enough of these threads on Hacker News to know the answer is clearly "it's different because I don't like him." Zed wounded a lot of egos back in the day, so calls for positivity that may otherwise work on HN are going to fail. By framing him as a "controversial figure" they attempt to create a route to hate on him that doesn't count as shit talking.

michaelochurch 12y ago
I've seen enough of these threads on Hacker News to know the answer is clearly "it's different because I don't like him." Zed wounded a lot of egos back in the day, so calls for positivity that may otherwise work on HN are going to fail. By framing him as a "controversial figure" they attempt to create a route to hate on him that doesn't count as shit talking. I don't know of anyone else in tech who's had that experience, ha.

puranjay 12y ago

I'm merely commenting on the quality of the course, not the course creator. I found this course useful. But not as useful as some others. Learning the basics were easy enough, but Zed kinda tripped over with the harder topics such as OOP. Overall, it's a good place to start programming if you've never done it before, but you will need to look elsewhere for clarity if you want to make sense of anything beyond If-Then statements and while/for loops

anon1385 12y ago

As somebody who doesn't know Python I would never use this book or recommend it to others. The reason for that is nothing to do with drama over Ruby (which I don't know either) but purely because of the quality of his other work about languages that I do know. In particular his C book and his comments about C on this site. Anybody who knows C should read this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834869 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8834869 The take aways are that Zed doesn't understand C and hasn't read the C standard. He even takes pride in his lack of knowledge of the fundamental concepts that you need to understand to write correct C, and mocks those who do take the time to learn about the standard. Such a person should not be writing a book to teach C to beginners. People following his advice are going to write code that is dangerously incorrect. (If you want to take the position that C is insane and nobody should use it then that is fair enough and hard to disagree with, but in that case the honest thing to do is to encourage people not to use C; don't write a book teaching dangerous practices to beginners). Since I don't know Python I have no way to know if he takes a similar attitude towards Python. What aspects of the language does he ignore because he is too prideful to read the standards or documentation? Given what I know about his attitude towards C, I can't trust him to teach me the things I would need to know to use Python correctly and safely.

teach 12y ago
Your dismissal of his Python material is unfounded. This book is quite good, especially for beginners that literally would be unable to learn to code otherwise. As a professional educator myself, I strongly disagree with your sentiment about "teaching dangerous practices to beginners". By far, the biggest "danger" to beginners is that they won't learn how to code at all or get frustrated and quit because of pedants. Do we teach beginning drivers using 18-wheeled tractor trailers? Or using F-15 fighter jets? No, we use cars with automatic shifting driving around in an empty parking lot at first.
- rifung 12y ago
  I don't think your analogy really makes sense; the issue isn't that the author tries to teach people things which are too difficult to handle but that the author may state things which are just incorrect. A better analogy would be teaching beginning drivers to use their knees instead of hands to drive. I suppose I'm in a different position than you though; I don't see any need to get everyone to start coding. I think if people want to code there are already good books out there, and if they don't then I don't think we need more developers who hate their job.

makeitsuckless 12y ago

He had the gall to criticize the Ruby on Rails community when RoR was still considered sacred (I believe that honeymoon is pretty much over now) in the hipster coding circles that form a considerable and certainly very vocal part of HN. Also, the puritanical American allergy for "profanity" under the thing guise of "professionalism" doesn't mix well with mr. Shaw's somewhat direct methods of communicating.

michaelochurch 12y ago

How about you let go of the hate and embrace some love instead for the work this man has put forth? I'm with you. The man cares and, for all of his supposed abrasiveness, he's a good communicator. He's smart and he's not afraid to bring out the honest truth (e.g. "Programming, motherfucker") about an issue.

drobati 12y ago

I met Zed Shaw in Atlanta during PyCon 2011 and I thought he was a pretty nice guy. People hate his opinions but the hate is unjustified.

jackmaney 12y ago

Honestly, I have no idea where this hatred of Zed Shaw comes from. Yes, the man is opinionated, but he's no more of an asshole about it than most people (which is to say, not much of an asshole at all).