Remember Zed Shaw’s “Rails is a Ghetto”? All about how the Rails community is being taken over by boring, pretentious, corporate wanna-be suits with their prattle about “professionalism”, pretentious posturing, MBA peacocking and assorted other behaviours unwanted in the dynamic and creative Ruby community.
Well, these MSCE-having douchebags are out in full force today. You see, there was this little Ruby conference in San Fran, and a presenter there had the temerity to include - wait for it - references to porn in his talk. Plus some pictures of scantily clad girls.
OH NOES
Now, I thought the talk was fine, and very well made. The content may have been slightly risqué, in a US context anyway, but no big deal. Actually I appreciate the creativity - there’s nothing more boring than yet another “professional” presentation. I use Ruby because I hate acting “professional”.
But oh boy, the reaction.
Some commentors were frankly laughable - one woman in particular went so far to claim the presentation made her fear for her safety, as if the entire body of men in the audience were in danger of rising as one and assaulting her in some kind of insane porn-fueled gang rape:
To most of these men around me, I am, at best, an oddity, and at worst, a sexual target. I feel a little less safe.
I suggest this poor woman seek therapy for these delusions.
Other reactions include pathetic “I am being victimised” attention-seeking, lame attempts at demonstrating how much “I truly care about women” etc, hilarious “I am leaving the Ruby community and re-installing Visual Studio” threats (please do!), and every combination thereof. I cannot help but think that if Matt’s presentation has the effect of getting rid of these disingenuous wowsers then he should henceforth be invited, nay required, to present at every Rails conference.
Comments from the SlideShare page from sad Java programmers:
I’ve talked with two large IT shops who’ve said that there is no way they’ll ever let Ruby in their companies because of this horse shit.
Lol, good. The less “large IT shops” pissing in the Ruby pond the better. And if their management is so stupid as to choose technology because of “some presentation given by some guy at some conference” then no doubt they’ll be out of business soon anyway.
I think Matt just blew the image of the Ruby community by doing something like this.
WTF? Who even thinks like this? Whatever, I am glad they do:
I’ll avoid joining the Ruby/Rails community at all. So will many other engineers, given the remarkable and continual display of unprofessionalism from you, the community, and even its leaders
Uh, OK. Door’s that way. By the way, you’re not a real engineer, did you know?
Is this the ruby community , sexist and racist? I am going back to .net and FU all!
Lol, enjoy! Wait, racist?
And so on and so on. Pretty funny. Thanks for the GC patch, Matt, it’s proving very effective.
About the only person whose reaction to this I truly admire is DHH himself’s. And he is the father of Rails, so if he doesn’t mind it, then all these “this is inappropriate for a professional conference blah blah” business-card-offering synergystic-opportunity-seeking suit-wearing jerks can go jump off a cliff, IMO.
