Zed Shaw Rants on Rails

ZSFA — Rails Is A Ghetto (2007-12-31)

In which it is revealed that the original, numero uno, flagship Rails application, the one that inspired all the others, that made David Heinemeineimeinememeir Hansen a cult figure — the original rails app had to be restarted 400 times per day.

Now, DHH tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother fucking day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches. These restarts went away after I exposed bugs in the GC and Threads which Mentalguy fixed with fastthread (like a Ninja, Mentalguy is awesome).

If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

Repeat that to yourself. “He couldn’t keep his own servers running for longer than 4 minutes on average.”

Assuming his statements are true (which we may never know) he basically duped us all.

I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad about never having become a Rails whiz after all. (For the record, Zed prefers Merb, though he’s getting out of the Ruby biz altogether).

The rant is a good read, though angry and hostile and rude.

Ruby needs less killer apps and more creative madness anyway. If Ruby starts taking itself too seriously it’s going to just turn into a Python clone.

UPDATE: just noticed part 2 is out, and it turns out that stuff about DHH is based on a total misunderstanding.  Shaw ends up praising DHH for being a decent kind guy to him even after he ripped him like that.

I might have some more comments on the rest of it when I’ve got some more time.

2 thoughts on “Zed Shaw Rants on Rails”

  1. Maybe I just like seeing idols smashed, but I really enjoyed it. Part of me thinks I should disapprove, but he didn’t tear apart anything that in the end I liked that much. So I can watch from outside and smile.

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