Anybody keeping up on the ruby drama lately? · general

First ruby central has a tussle with ruby gems and then DHH continues with his racist right wing blog posts pissing off a large section of the community.

I just adore ruby and even have a great fondness for rails but the community seems to be falling apart.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 23 2025 at 07:36):

there was a talk at RustForge (not yet up on YouTube) where the speaker gave a personal history of starting out in the Ruby community, becoming part of the inner circle, being surrounded by folks that were quite unfriendly and becoming that way themselves, publicly being a jerk to folks in other projects, taking a step back and realising they were making bad choices, and finding other language communities were the inner circle is kinder

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 23 2025 at 07:37):

it seems like every technology has trade-offs, and increasingly the trade-offs aren't technical but are in the squishy fleshy organic political human part

Tim Uckun (Sep 23 2025 at 08:05):

Every open source project is a community and this applies to languages and frameworks even more so. There are apparently 7000 contributors to Rails. If I was to make a bet a non trivial number of those commits are made by immigrants, non whites, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Apparently both DHH and Tobi are openly hostile towards those groups of people and they are two most influential and powerful people in the Ruby and Rails community and neither one of them are hesitant to broadcast their beliefs on their blogs and greater social media.

I don't think this is a great way to grow your community and people certainly have alternatives if they don't feel welcome or wanted in a community.

I keep thinking this might be a good opportunity for projects like Hanami to attract users to their frameworks. The stink of DHH and Tobi are likely to linger around rails but not necessarily to the greater ruby community.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 23 2025 at 08:47):

Jerod Santo (Sep 23 2025 at 13:36):

@Tim Uckun is there a blog post rounding up the goings on? I saw the Ruby Central post and a few responses to it, but nothing else. Also, please refrain from name calling (.i.e 'racist') on our Zulip.

Tim Uckun (Sep 23 2025 at 21:36):

And to be technical I didn't call DHH racist, I called his posts racist. Subtle difference.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 23 2025 at 22:32):

i think criticising behaviour and explicitly NOT criticising people is of great importance
it's a cornerstone of forgiveness, to leave space for someone to learn and change their behaviour

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 24 2025 at 00:13):

rv sounds interesting
I'm surprised (due to my own ignorance/bubble) there's still enough use of Ruby to justify this sort of investment

Tim Uckun (Sep 24 2025 at 03:58):

Frankly I don't even understand what DHH is on about. AFIK he lives in California and is an immigrant and is not native. Even if he has another residence in London he is still a non native immigrant. I mean who cares?

When I lived in the USA it was pretty uncommon experience to hang out with a Native American, it never bothered me to interact with non natives or immigrants. Now that I live in New Zealand my interactions with native (Maori) people are very common but still most of my interactions are with non natives and immigrants from other countries. None of that is not and was never a concern or a cause for alarm for me.

rv does sound interesting and ruby powers shopify, stripe, github, airbnb and lots of other large corporations. There is still plenty of interest in ruby but admittedly it's been fading a bit given the surge in python in AI and JS in web dev work and go/rust in system programming.

I don't think all this drama is going to attract new users to the language or framework though which I think is sad because as I said before I absolutely adore ruby. It's an amazing language and a joy to program in.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 24 2025 at 04:19):

Well, it might attract _more_ people to Ruby, if those opinions are popular
And polling suggests that they aren't as unpopular as they used to be

Tim Uckun (Sep 24 2025 at 04:22):

Tim Uckun (Sep 28 2025 at 21:17):

The drama keeps going on. Friend of the podcast Justin Searls has posted something about it. There is an open letter asking for a hard fork (whatever that means) of rails with a lot of signatories. Both DHH and Tobi are posting alpha male memes on xitter bragging about how powerful and mighty they are and how weak and inept everybody who criticises them are.

I thought this would die down quickly but people are doubling down on their positions and politics.

What's missing are the voices from Japan (understandable since AFIK they work mostly on ruby core) and employees from shopify rails and ruby teams (understandable since their paycheck depends of Tobi and DHH).

Also missing are people who run competing frameworks such as hanami, roda, sinatra etc (I know roda and sinatra aren't really frameworks). One possible outcome from this is a competing ruby based full stack framework and I for one would welcome that. Rails is full of magic and is a memory hog and isn't that JIT friendly and doesn't work well with jruby. It would be interesting to create a new framework that's no or very low magic and maybe even embraces RBS or Sorbet to provide type safety.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 28 2025 at 23:03):

I hope Matz is okay, this would be pretty upsetting to me if I were the creator of Ruby

Tim Uckun (Sep 29 2025 at 01:26):

I think the ire is mostly pointed at rails, DHH, and Tobi at this point. Although the rubygems issue effects all ruby users it was mostly done by and at the behest of Shopify from what I can tell.

But I am sure this will have a negative impact on the ruby community as a whole as many people who use ruby and contribute to the tens of thousands of ruby gems are not native, are immigrants or are members of the LGBTQ+ community and might not feel welcome in a community where the two of the most powerful members of the community are openly hostile to them are mocking them on social media.

Tim Uckun (Sep 29 2025 at 01:28):

I really hope other prominent members of both rails and ruby communities speak up and assure people that they are welcome in the community despite the hostility expressed by DHH and Tobi.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 29 2025 at 01:36):

Google Trends shows a gentle decline in interest since 2023, but if anything the recent controversy seems to have boosted keyword searches for Ruby over the last few days

Tim Uckun (Sep 29 2025 at 03:10):

Lars Ellingsen (Sep 29 2025 at 03:35):

I will say, without getting into specific political viewpoints on either side, this feels like it’s in stark contrast to the welcoming community I just watched in the Python doc.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 29 2025 at 03:38):

does Ruby have any technical advantages over Python these days? or is it mostly brownfield / technical-debt that stops folks from moving over?

Tim Uckun (Sep 29 2025 at 03:55):

I haven't done a benchmark lately but in the past ruby used to be faster than python. Rubygems and bundler are also superior to the python ecosystem but I understand python has finally cracked that nut after more than a half a dozen attempts at sane package management and env management.

Other than that it's vibes. Ruby gives me joy to program in. Kind of an ineffable thing.

Recently I started writing some code to manage my dotfiles (called dotty), since I just bought a new laptop I thought I would also use that to install all the apps I use. Here are some snippets

require_relative './lib/dotty'
Dir[File.join(__dir__, 'recipes', '*.rb')].sort.each { |file| require_relative file }

Current.dotty_dir = File.join(__dir__, 'dotfiles')
# pp Current.secret_key
os 'darwin' do
  install_xcode_select
  install_homebrew
  ssh_keys
  mise
  brewfile
  symlinks %w[
    ~/.zshrc
    ~/.oh-my-zsh
    ~/.gitconfig
    ~/.gitignore_global
    ~/.orbstack
    ~/.config/mise
  ]
end

def ssh_keys
  mkdir '~/.ssh', user: Current.user, group: 'staff', mode: 0o0700
  symlink '~/.ssh/config'
  symlink '~/.ssh/known_hosts'
  symlink '~/.ssh/authorized_keys'
  file('~/.ssh/id_rsa', user: Current.user, group: 'staff', mode: 0o600, encrypted: true)
  file('~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub', user: Current.user, group: 'staff', mode: 0o600, encrypted: true)
end

def install_mise
  # This installs mise and all mise managed packages
  execute 'brew install mise && eval "$(mise activate zsh)"',
          not_if: 'which mise > /dev/null',
          msg: 'Installing mise'
end

def mise_install(package, version: nil, not_if: nil)
  version ||= 'latest'
  # could be mise which, could also grep for the version in which ls but
  # I can't figure out  how to tell if the latest is installed
  not_if ||= "mise ls  #{package} > /dev/null"
  execute "mise use --global #{package}@#{version}",
          not_if: not_if
end

def mise
  install_mise
  mise_install 'ruby', version: 3.4
end

You just can't write code like this in python or go or any other language I know. Not just these snippets but the code they call. It's all just so ergonomic and human.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 29 2025 at 03:56):

Tim Uckun (Sep 29 2025 at 04:04):

The cool thing is that everything is a recipe in the recipes folder. I just create a new file, write five or ten lines and voila it's done.

Having said that the "symlink" and "file" recipes are much longer because they do all kinds of weird things I want to do. Things like figure out default sources for the file, encrypt and decrypt files, make backups of existing symlinks and files before overwriting them etc.

The "symlink" recipe is the largest one and it's sixty whole lines long including comments.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 29 2025 at 04:16):

i guess Ruby itself may still claim brew as its killer app (besides Rails), so it doesn't need to worry about usage/interest until that project starts looking for greener pastures

Tim Uckun (Sep 29 2025 at 04:22):

IIRC stripe is a ruby app which is not rails. Rails runs shopify, github, airbnb and a bunch of other good sized apps.

Ron Waldon-Howe (Sep 29 2025 at 04:26):

i consider all of those examples to be companies, not killer apps :)
developer market/mind share doesn't really care what those are implemented in, so long as the HTTP API stays the same :)
people do self-host GitLab which is also written in Ruby, but again, i'm not sure that counts as really exposing developers to Ruby

Stream: general

Topic: Anybody keeping up on the ruby drama lately?

Tim Uckun (Sep 23 2025 at 06:00):