Giles on Rails:
 
I've been coding Ruby near-exclusively for years now. On the one hand, I want to tell you we're not all like that. On the other hand, RailsConf is just weeks away, and I'm dreading it so much that words fail me, because even though we're not all like that, an awful lot of us are exactly like that. I'm not at all surprised to find idiots defending the presentation, and that shameful, ridiculous unpology the presenter delivered is par for the course.
I got a similar unpology from another Rails guy after I threatened to kick his ass at a conference. This guy and his partner do a podcast, and in one episode, they had included an mp3 of a black man using racist epithets, including that mother of all racist epithets which starts with the letter N. This other Rails guy was at this conference. He's black. He had been listening to this podcast with his three-year-old daughter playing in the room. She asked him, what's that word mean, Daddy? and he didn't really want to get into that discussion at that particular time. So at this conference he's telling these guys they should put some kind of "warning explicit content" or something on there, and they did everything short of laughing at him. Eventually they apologized, but it wasn't until after I had threatened to beat the shit out of them both.
Anyway, afterwards, I got this sickening, condescending unpology about it, basically, here's one sentence of me being "polite" and "apologizing", oh, and - added bonus, for free! - here's four paragraphs of why you were wrong to have gotten mad in the first place. They basically said everything to me via e-mail that, in person, I had told them I would kick their asses if they didn't stop saying.
By the way, both the main guy in that incident, and this guy with the porn presentation, are parts of something called the Rails Activists team, which is basically a group of people who are recognized for doing a lot of work evangelizing Rails. It's kind of a badge of honor for people who do a lot to build Rails' good name in the community. I'm not fucking kidding you, at all. This embarasses me in a way I can't even articulate.
Due to these sickening, corrupted vibrations, RailsConf is like a super-powered douchebag magnet or the epicenter of a legendary douchequake and I don't want to go anywhere near it. As a matter of fact I'm only flying in for one day of it, and I'll be in a concurrent anticonf called Caboose instead of the actual conf itself - which is, incidentally, an utterly shit conf. I've been to nearly every Ruby conference in the English-speaking world and RailsConf is one of the worst.
There are Rubyists who will only go to Ruby conferences and refuse to go to any Rails events because of the difference between the Rails and Ruby communities. Believe me when I say we're not all like that. We're not. But believe Zed Shaw when he says the Rails community has some serious problems, because it does. It's not half as bad in Ruby-land, and I think these off-the-charts asshole-per-capita readings are what drove the development of Merb for a while - I think a large part of it was people who loved Ruby but hated the Rails community.
I don't blame anyone who thinks less of the Rails community for this incident. I think less of the Rails community for this incident, and I'm part of the community. I've worked in Python and with numerous other languages and the simple truth is that if you know what you're doing, there are a lot of languages out there and work's available in all of them. I've put my energy into Ruby because I love the language, and because it's actually really easy to tune these monkeys out completely. I spend tons of time on Twitter with other Rubyists without ever interacting with these guys. I went to about 15 conferences and user groups last year and everything was fine and everybody was cool, besides of course that one podcast racism incident, and RailsConf, and its hellacious, petty, passive-aggressive, manipulative, demented, twisted mental patient of an organizer, Chad Fowler, who I went off on a very angry rant about which concluded with some lurid, violent, and blatantly absurd imagery that got me banned from RubyConf.
Wait a minute. Now that I think about it, if you're that angry, it's probably a SIGN.
OK I admit it. Rails has an assholes problem. However! Rails has the assholes problem, not Ruby; and, there are also tons of Rails people who are cool, nice, considerate, intelligent, honorable, and all the rest of it.
edit: you know, I just re-read this, trying to get an impression of how it sounded while playing the part of an unbiased reader in my mind, and how it sounded was crazy. I think I might delete it after a while but I'm going to leave it up for now. however, I might as well also point out, as far as I can tell there are jerks in every open source community. probably won't change any time soon, either.