I'm Leaving Ruby Central

> But not everyone felt so good about it. I worked for Engine Yard, and we had made our mark selling Ruby on Rails deployment to large customers like Groupon, Kongregate and Github. I got hired at Engine Yard in part because the company's founders were worried that Rails wouldn't make it long-term. They wanted to hedge against this possibility.

> Unfortunately for me, waging an all-out war against Ruby on Rails from inside of a company that makes its money selling Ruby on Rails deployment is a pretty bad life strategy.

> I don't know everything that went on behind the scenes, but Engine Yard's management eventually asked me to consider merging with Rails. If I'm being honest, they pushed me to consider merging with Rails.

I'm sure there were other reasons for the merge as well, and I don't want to take anything away from Yehuda and the decision he made at the time, but I was a volunteer at the first MerbConf just a couple months before the "merge" and it all felt very sudden and at odds with the direction the project was headed. I had my cynical take that EY was behind the move, but those were just my personal feelings. Honestly it was refreshing to read Yehuda's story 12 years later as it helped put some of the pieces together as to why.

As an aside, I imagine the discussion of this will be end up being... difficult, because people are tending not react to these sorts of things well.

And history ain't written. Who knows how this will hurt them.

Shopify is a multi-billion dollar company that has processed over a trillion dollars. They are a high value target for sophisticated attackers. It’s entirely possible they are trying to accomplish some security and supply chain goals to protect their Ruby pipeline, but completely messed up the execution and did not predict the community interpretation and backlash.

0: https://www.shopify.com/news/david-heinemeier-hansson-board

Ruby was used, for example, as the DevOps language prior to Go

A decade before Rails puts it in 1995. Do you have some resources on this? I like looking into the history of tech.

The tool looks to replace gems and it's ecosystem.

But the Web is notorious for the problems I listed, you end up with standards around not following standards. It leaves almost all the responsibility on the client tool (browser or whatever) to do validation to stop malicious sites, name squatting, accepting and "fixing" poorly constructed metadata etc.

> Deno is a Javascript implementation for the backend that attempts to mimic this pattern (it later introduced a more npm-like centralized repository, but afaik it's optional). Deno is of course less popular than Python, but its url-centered model can really scale imo.

I was not familiar with Deno, I've done some shallow reading on this now and it's certainly interesting. I don't know enough about the JavaScript world to make a comment on the pros or cons.

But I don't think can work for Python, as transitive dependencies would immediately conflict as soon as dependencies required a different version of the same transitive dependency. And the guarantee of Python packaging is you only have a single version of a library installed in an environment, while it can cause some dependency solver headache, it also solves a lot of problems as it makes it safe to pass around objects.