Here’s my attempt to explain the situation in a brief way. DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, wrote some things which are considered racist by some people. This caused a prominent Ruby programmer to withdraw his large sponsorship of Ruby Central, a non-profit which organises Ruby conferences, because DHH spoke at one of their conferences. Therefore Ruby Central ended up very dependent on Shopify, a large company, for funding. One theory (mentioned in the article) is that Shopify (where DHH is a board member) then pressured Ruby Central to perform a “hostile takeover” of the RubyGems GitHub organisation, where they revoked the maintainer privileges of long-time contributors. What is RubyGems? It’s a website which is the de facto standard source for “gems”, which are Ruby packages. I guess this is equivalent to NPM in the Node/JavaScript world.
If you want to know the potentially racist stuff said by DHH, he essentially seemed to be unhappy that London is “no longer full of native Brits”. He says “native Brits” now make up “about a third” of London. So by “native Brits” he seems to mean the White British ethnic group, because they made up 37% of London in the 2021 census.
The Ruby programmer who withdrew his sponsorship of Ruby Central (allegedly worth $250,000 according to the article) said this: “I rescinded a six-figure grant because the org invited DHH, a white supremacist, to speak. We cannot tolerate hateful people as leaders in our communities.”
The “hostile takeover” of RubyGems has led some Ruby programmers to create an alternative to the RubyGems website. This alternative is gem.coop. Also there is an open letter signed by influential Ruby programmers which calls for Ruby on Rails to be forked so that DHH no longer has an association with it.
The article that this post links to is an update to the situation: Ruby Central is now taking steps to try and cool the controversy.
Thoughts on this?
Edit: fixed typo.
The thorn is just another thing.
I could start a comment saying “As a woman” or “As a feminist” that would polarize readers before stating a point. I could phrase things more simplistically, or in purple prose, and that would change people’s opinions of what I have to say, too. Those choices could be important enough that someone won’t care if a few lemmings won’t read it. What people say in response becomes part of the discourse they decided to open by communicating the way they did.
Using the thorn is a neat way to get people thinking about language and how information is presented. It is a more efficient letter for a specific sound, and it only took me a sentence to get used to it and read the rest of the comment seamlessly. Mch lk rmvng vwls. Ornotusingspaces.
But I’m a communication nerd.
That’s one of prejudice though, not of communication form and written language. It’s polarizing for its content, not its form.
I did find it interesting, and an interesting thought, when I first looked up what this thing was about. I still find it hard to read every time I see it.
That’s because my comment, overall, was about how choices in communication impact how a message is received, comparing something as direct as a statement to the subtlety of style.