Ruby Deserves Better Leadership Than Dhh

Posted3 months agoActive3 months ago

slippersod

26 points

11 comments

victorwynne.comOtherstory

heatednegative

Debate

80/100

Ruby Programming LanguageDhhCulture WarLeadership

Key topics

Ruby Programming Language

Dhh

Culture War

Leadership

The post criticizes DHH's leadership of Ruby due to his political views, sparking a heated discussion about separating politics from technical leadership and the potential for cultural bias.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

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Peak period

0-2h

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Key moments

01Story posted
Sep 25, 2025 at 5:13 PM EDT
3 months ago
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02First comment
Sep 25, 2025 at 5:36 PM EDT
23m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
4 comments in 0-2h
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04Latest activity
Sep 26, 2025 at 3:51 PM EDT
3 months ago
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Discussion (11 comments)

Showing 10 comments of 11

johnwheeler

3 months ago

2 replies

Yeah, this is a stupid post. Why should someone not be allowed to have political views that are opposed to your own? And why would that make them unsuitable to manage Ruby technically?

viraptor

3 months ago

1 reply

Because the impact of them keeping potential contributors away may be larger then their positive impact on the project. If you don't care about the leader's views, you won't care if it's someone other than DHH. If you don't want to work in a community accepting racists, you care if it's DHH. Also in general, world where the leaders are not racists and nationalists is a better place - not sure why that's something that needs elaboration.

johnwheeler

3 months ago

1 reply

Bull. That’s a slippery slope argument. Also, if we follow that logic, there always will be people that don’t want to work with others for their beliefs, regardless of what those are.

viraptor

3 months ago

Not a slippery slope. It already happens in practice. For example, the most I hear about D-lang is from people leaving the community due to its "we don't care about politics" stance which caused failure to moderate abuse.

> if we follow that logic, there always will be people that

Now that's slippery slope... People may not agree with each other, but there's a massive difference between "I don't like something trivial" and "I think that group of people should not exist". It's not all the same thing or equally important. There's a good reason to remove community leaders who have the latter views.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF

3 months ago

"Political views that are opposed to your own" is not an accurate characterization of the opposition to his stature as a community figure.

ChrisArchitect

3 months ago

1 reply

Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45348390

Ruby Central's Attack on RubyGems

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45299170

A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45325792

I'm leaving Ruby Central

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45352432

Bundler Belongs to the Ruby Community

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371061

srid

3 months ago

The Ruby community has a DHH problem

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45331065

An open letter calling for a hard fork of Rails to remove DHH's influence

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45366312

(Both flagged)

dismalaf

3 months ago

DHH doesn't lead Ruby...

And silence from Ruby leadership? Probably because like half of them are Japanese. A culture known for being way more conservative than Americans and Europeans. Not exactly pro-immigration either. And the BDFL is a devout Mormon, a religion also known for being conservative.

Take your culture war somewhere else...

wilg

3 months ago

I think there's no question DHH's latest blog post is fully racist, and its absolutely true that there's a bunch of people on HN who will downvote and flag anything "political". So its basically impossible to have a conversation about this here.

akagusu

3 months ago

How much time will it take to HN community censor/flag this post?

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