Ruby's website got an overhaul
41 points by weaksauce
41 points by weaksauce
Showing DHH so prominently is certainly a choice.
Would Ruby be a notable language without Ruby on Rails? Serious question, although perhaps impossible to answer since who knows what might have been. But in the version of history we lived, it would be hard to deny the significance of RoR to the Ruby language, regardless of what you think of it and its author.
I don't see a denial of impact of RoR, but rather an opinion of its inventor, his personal choices, and their impact. Arguing against the former seems an odd rebuttal of the latter.
There’s also Metasploit, which is completely unrelated. And AFAIK _why the Lucky Stiff also started messing with Ruby before Rails was a thing.
One could choose to quote and feature any one of a number of prolific Rails contributors instead of DHH.
I mean “notable” is a very murky criteria. Is OCaml notable? Is Elixir notable? Clojure?
Ruby would probably be in that sphere of languages people like to use but are not necessarily the best choice for any one application.
And they couldn't even find a profile pic where he's smiling and looks friendly, it's hilarious 😂
Also I can't help but wonder what he thinks of seeing so many non-white people on the hero image lol.
I detest DHH’s socio-political perspective, and what seems to be flat-out contempt for the community. This has been his chosen profile pic for everything for years, so it doesn’t seem to be much of a choice, just his default. That is not in opposition to anything you’re saying, only adding context.
Just a note that Matz's GH profile pic is a cartoon, and the website people found a different one where he's smiling; Dave Thomas' pic is from his Wikipedia page; and DHH's Wikipedia page has a picture of him smiling but they didn't use that pic. This could easily be explained by DHH telling them to use his current avatar pic though.
I would be willing to bet not smiling is a deliberate choice to "look more macho", at least from what I understand of this sort of culture...
I'm completely opposed to DHH politically and socially. That said, I'm not sure boycott is the right answer.
How about just not featuring him personally so prominently, as one of two people who apparently matter enough to feature on the landing page? Not sure in what world just not featuring someone on your website is considered a "boycott"
Besides what other commenters have pointed out, something bothered me about the copy and it took a while to realize: Ecosystem, Productivity, and Community are all nouns, but Simple is an adjective. It should really be "Simplicity" to match.
I used to write a bit of Ruby and they did a good job embodying the fun I felt writing it. The Ruby, Clojure and Rust communities all emit a sense of joy in their tech.
I just noticed they changed the syntax in the first example. It used to say something like:
say["love"] = "*love*"
puts say.upcase
which I didn't even realize was valid syntax.
The new example they have is much clearer:
say = say.sub("love", "*love*")
puts say.upcase
The old example would be broken anyway since string litterals are frozen by default now.
Sadly, frozen string literals are neither the default in current Ruby versions nor will they be the default in Ruby 4.0.
Too me too in design for my taste. Too much white space, and the vertical sections remind me of any boilerplate site. Fashion following instead of fashion leading?
How about something special?
Love the fact of giving some marketing love to Ruby's homepage, but it now looks like any other landing page.