It doesn’t matter whether “Matz is nice” - po-ru.com
I’ve met Matz once, I think, at EuRuKo in Krakow in 2010. We<br>chatted briefly in Japanese. He seemed nice, but also quiet and<br>reserved. At the time, he didn’t speak much English; perhaps he could speak<br>more and just wasn’t particularly confident, but he didn’t.
Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, is the creator and chief designer of the Ruby<br>programming language. He isn’t outspoken, he doesn’t make many pronouncements<br>outside the strictly technical arena, and he conducts most of his online life<br>in Japanese. That provides a space onto which to project anything, and that<br>gave us a motto of the Ruby programming community: MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and<br>so we are nice”).
I’m not saying that Matz isn’t nice, but the “Matz is nice” trope was only ever<br>projection, and in the end it doesn’t matter, because if we’re honest, we must<br>conclude that the Ruby community is not “nice”.
Two of the most obvious “not nice” but powerful people in Ruby are David<br>Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, and Tobias Lütke, and Matz shares a<br>stage with both of them.
Let’s take DHH first. He is the creator of and prime mover behind the Ruby on<br>Rails framework. Rails is Ruby’s success story, and represents the vast<br>majority of Ruby development and deployment. It has given me much of my paid<br>work for the past couple of decades.
DHH owns the Ruby on Rails trademark and is, in effect, the dictator for life<br>of the project.<br>He was a controversial figure in the early days of his Ruby fame.
He’s noisy, he’s reactionary, he’s anti-intellectual, he’s very sure that he<br>is right, and he enjoys being rude.
But who among us has not been an idiot in their youth? He seemed to grow up,<br>calm down, chill out, and for a time even espoused inclusive policies<br>and ideas.
More recently, however, he has pivoted his entire online personality to being<br>obdurately “anti-woke”, and started to publish pieces that are increasingly,<br>unarguably, white nationalist and far right in tone and content, lauding<br>Stephen Yaxley-Lennon dba Tommy Robinson, attacking immigrants and other<br>minorities, and generally revelling in reactionary bigotry.
“As I remember London” should be a wake-up call for everyone in the Ruby and<br>Rails communities. This is not a man who wants to keep going. This is a man<br>who romanticizes a past that was predominantly good for white men. This is a<br>man who has spent years railing against diversity, equity and inclusion and<br>who spreads anti-trans rhetoric. This is a man who is deeply afraid of<br>immigration changing countries’ cultures and “national identities”, despite<br>this kind of change being a constant for the whole of human history. This is<br>a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of Rails, this<br>framework we all love.
Unfortunately it isn’t just migrants and non-white people that have come<br>under fire in DHH’s recent writing and social media posts. There have been<br>multiple examples of anti-trans rhetoric. There was the post where he<br>described an ad featuring a plus-sized Black women as “grotesque” and<br>celebrated the ads being replaced with ones featuring “blond babies” (what is<br>it about the baby’s blondness that is relevant I wonder?). There have been<br>the posts veering into puritanical Pronatalism, another favourite subject of<br>the nationalist right. Whether it’s his direct intention or not, there has<br>been a consistent theme of othering and stigmatising in his recent writing.
In the past few weeks, DHH has gone much further, calling for “remigration”,<br>the euphemism for mass deportation of citizens used by the far right.
Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going<br>forward. It’s also that millions who are already in Europe must go.<br>Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in<br>record time on account of that realization.
He has also, most recently, compared Roma people to wolves that need to be shot,<br>and then got very upset when an LLM refused to translate it because<br>it was “dehumanizing towards an ethnic group”. You don’t gotta hand it to the<br>LLMs, but on this occasion, fair play.
When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public<br>spaces, you deport them. This isn’t hard, it isn’t cruel. It’s the basic<br>logic of self-preservation.
As Emily Gorcenski pithily observed:
just figured out what the HH in DHH stands for
Hansson is also a board member of Shopify, a company that provides hosted<br>online shops, and who you may know from 10,000 annoying podcast ads.
Shopify employs five of the ten foremost current human (we’ll get to that)<br>contributors to the Ruby language. It is the largest sponsor of the Ruby Central<br>organisation, and exercises a great deal of de facto control over the Ruby<br>ecosystem as a result. When Sidekiq withdrew their sponsorship after<br>Ruby Central announced DHH as a speaker at the final RailsConf – the final<br>RailsConf because Hansson, piqued at not being invited to a previous year,...