Coding Horror: Douchebaggery

"David (heinemeier Hansson) gets off on putting other people down."

And there's a pretty serious backlash appearing on the horizon because of it. If Jeff Atwood, who is normally a really nice and straight guy, starts writing personal attacks then I think that DHH has a potential problem.

Note: I don't personally have anything against DHH, I've met him once and hes one of the smartest guys I've talked to. He even bought the beer...

I think you're right that there's going to be (is?) a Rails "backlash", but I disagree that it has anything to do with DHH or his personality. (What, you think Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, and Steve Ballmer are humble and self-effacing?) It's just the backside of the hype cycle.

Rails is no longer as young and hot as it used to be, and the fanboys and the media will move on to something else. Because Rails was the subject of such breathless hype from the Silver Bullet crowd, the "backlash" meme will probably get considerable media play as well. Nobody is more bitter than a frustrated seeker of Silver Bullets.

Meanwhile, Rails and Merb and jRuby and other Ruby-based tools will continue to slowly improve, as such tools generally do.

You can argue over whether or not such hype cycles are useful in the long term. They certainly didn't hurt Java.

Douchebaggery, indeed.

In my experience, the people who get tweaked when someone like DHH expresses a strong opinion, are usually the same ones to suck the creativity and excitement out of any room they enter.

Unless you're planning to work with DHH, what do you care what he thinks about your laptop? Learn to deal.

The argument about OSes has long since left the realm of useful debate about relative merits and become some sort of brand-identification circlejerk. Apple is always going to win that war because Windows, for as long as it is dominant, will always be bourgeois. It's the same with Sam Adams vs. Budweiser.

That's the price you pay for achieving ubiquity. You forfeit the hipster dufus demographic.

PHP? Ruby? You were thinking Unix and using Windows; no wonder it didn't work. Windows probably works much better if you've never seen Unix and you stick to 100% MS tools. (In other words, blub.)