Hacker News Reader

Comment by fingerprinter | Hacker News Reader

Just read the whole thread here and on github (https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/61b91c4c55bcbd5a2ec85d...)

Technical: DHH is wrong, plain and simple. No amount of defending the decision makes it right.

Community Management: DHH, while not as abrasive as Linus (another thread here linked to a kernel thread), IMO, DHH is (much) worse than Linus. Linus is abrasive and swears and yells. DHH is dismissive and condescending. DHH thinks he has better opinions, more depth of experience, smarter, more insight and generally "gets it" more than everyone around him, including the other maintainers.

View on HN

> DHH thinks he has better opinions, more depth of experience, smarter, more insight and generally "gets it" more than everyone around him, including the other maintainers.

Well, he does. He's been doing Rails for literally 10 years now, so, strictly speaking, he is the most qualified opinion on the world in the topic of "Rails the application framework".

I agree that he sound condescending, but I understand his viewpoint. He's pushed a lot of changes through rails that at the time felt a lot like this one - a very vocal subset of the community got up and screamed bloody murder, and nowadays everyone realized it was the right idea.

Anyway, "DHH is wrong, no possible way he's right" isn't really a productive attitude to take in this discussion. He's been doing this for 10 years. Maybe you don't agree entirely, but DHH always has very good reasons for his opinions.

10 years is a long time, I'm sure we can all agree, but having the most logged hours doesn't automatically make you the most qualified opinion in the world. There is a vast realm of other factors that should be considered.

In my personal experience, oftentimes the people who have been around the longest are somewhat incapable of completely understanding an outside or new perspective. The fact that they often dismiss it because "I've been doing this for 10 years, I'm the most qualified" is a large part of that reason.

I really don't see how you could say he is wrong. It's his open source project that he's put thousands of hours into and is providing for free to everyone that wishes to use it. You might not agree with what he says or decides on, that's completely fine. In that case you're completely free to use a different framework. Plenty of choice out there.

I find it interesting that development products/projects are probably the only place where no one will allow you to have a valid opinion as a non-contributing user. And people will defend this lunacy to amazing extremes, presumably because it's easier to tell everyone to fuck off than to filter and respond to the valid points.

I find this a bit disappointing because in any other situation, feedback and constructive criticism is welcome and typically acted on, even if you weren't involved in the production process. You might not be listened to, but you won't be silenced by your peers.

To use the silly analogy in the OP: you don't need to be a chef to say the food tastes like shit.

It's not completely his. Other developers have put in much more than him alone into rails, and you need to respect them for that.

You're absolutely right. The thing is if, as he (DHH) writes in his post, if they were to make a suggestion he would take them very serious.

But they did, and he didn't.

So you don't think it is possible to have an opinion on a project you maintain and be objectively wrong in that opinion[1]?

For instance, the GNOME3 guys and the design direction they are taking. No matter what, they can't be "wrong" (whatever that means in this case) in that opinion?

I get that objective right/wrong can get complex and murky rather rapidly, though I feel with experience people can actually make judgement calls on these. And in this case, checking in binary assets is wrong, from experience. It causes many more problems that it solves. So, DHH is "wrong" in this instance even if he himself feels that it is the way to go.

[1] - "wrong" might have been an improper word to use, though for the sake of consistency, I'm going to continue ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com