I love Why The Lucky Stiff™ and his crazy
creative ways. His latest post about me
and how nice The Ruby Community really is gave me chills. The great _why
is actually mentioning me! I mean, sure he’s dissing me without really dissing
me so that he can be an asshole while still being nice, but I got a mention
on his blog!

I remember when I first saw _why play with his Thirsty Cups. That was way
back before he got tired of the Nice Ruby Community becoming too commercial
so he didn’t want to come to RubyConf anymore. I think they had to kidnap him
to get him to perform at that RailsConf too. After that, he told all of his
super Nice Ruby Community friends that he’s going to do Hackety Hack
instead of hang with them. He even made his own special version of the
Ruby interpreter to make Shoes work.

It was a sad day for me, because really the only reason I hung out in Ruby
was because of _why. Mr. Why actually blessed me with his presence during
one of my hacking sessions and made me feel smarter by association. I
showed him Ragel (which he used to write Hpricot), and showed him some vim
tricks, and he talked to Obie. It was great just having him warming the
air near me.

In contrast to _why, other Nice Ruby People didn’t seem so nice. Austin
Ziegler once called me an asshole to my face in front of a bunch of people.
Ryan Davis said I act like a pussy online, and then tried to threaten me
physically on a cold New York street. Ara T. Howard spent a lot of time
telling people I didn’t know shit about systems (when I found the memory
leak he thought was part of the system). Dave Thomas actually
devoted an entire 20 seconds of his key note just to insult my work on
Mongrel. Kevin Clark repeatedly called me names without anyone saying anything
to him, because “fuck you FUCK YOU” is obviously nice.

But _why was nice all around. I mean sure, there was that spat with
Hpricot and Nokogiri over who had the fastest HTML parser on the planet.
And sure he just wrote a weirdly passive aggressive blog post mentioning me
that tells people not to feed the trolls (which oddly feeds the trolls).
And he insulted a heartfelt blog post I wrote to get
people to find help when they’re in trouble by going to a church. And yeah
I never said one bad thing about him (because honestly, I really do want
to be him when I grow up).

Other than all that he’s the real Jesus in this. The true saint. The one
to get the Nice Ruby People back on track to taking that wonderfully stable
Ruby interpreter his friend Matz wrote to the edges of all that is possible
in computing. Well, probably just the edges of what hundreds of thousands
of lines of C pre-processor code can do, but that’s still pretty far in
most circles.

If it weren’t for guys like _why holding down the real Nice Ruby Community
spirit, I don’t know where they’d be. I mean _why’s work is so successful
without being commercial, and yet is so similar to so many commercial
applications that other people have written already. People read his code
to find out all the great meta programming tricks they need to make their
software wonderfully readable. His book on Ruby is a classic training tool
that makes excellent Meta Programmers out of everyone.

The Truth About Trolls

You mean, people couldn’t figure out I was a fucking troll? How fucking
stupid do you have to be when my fucking blog is called “Zed’s So Fucking
Awesome”? It was entirely my intention that dickwads in the Ruby Old Guard
would would leave me the fuck alone. Either because of fear that I had
dirt on them, or fear that I could influence people with my writing.

Seriously, go back and look at all the times I’ve taken the Ruby Old Guard
to task for something stupid. You notice a trend? I don’t strike first.
Every time I say something about them, it’s in response to something stupid
they’ve written that’s just too juicy to not destroy. With a community
so hypocritical it’s just so easy to tear them apart when they make stupid
claims.

Take DHH’s Rails Myth #2
as the perfect example of how to be a passive aggressive asswipe. If you
have half a brain, you’ll read that post and see all the underhanded insults
and insinuations about my mental health masked with an air of concern. DHH
even emailed me claiming this little myth was written in the nicest possible
way.

If DHH were an actually positive nice person, he would have written this one
myth very differently. Instead of focusing on the past and on me, he would
have just said two things:

• In the past, Rails crashed, that is true. I should have been honest with everyone.
• Now, however, thanks to the work of many people, Rails does not crash, and we’re constantly
  working to keep it that way.

That’s all you have to write. No mentioning of mental states, no invoking
the Troll. Just admit your fault, and talk about how things are different.

But, doing that would mean that DHH and rails core would have to admit that
they hoodwinked everyone. When I talk about the 400 restarts/day admission,
I am not talking about the stability of Ruby now, I’m talking about
how DHH lied to everyone about Ruby’s stability then.

Again, nice people don’t fucking lie to millions of people who believe in
them.

The truth about trolls is that many times, they are just pointing out what the
community doesn’t want to see. When the dust settles, and most people have
left for something else, they can always look back and see large kernels of
truth in what the trolls said. I’ve seen it with C, C++, Java, and now Ruby.

Which is sad, because ignoring the trolls is really what kills a community
off.