Ruby is my favorite programming language. It’s a great language and nothing really comes close to it in terms of expressiveness. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s mine.

The Ruby community used to be known as being very friendly. I don’t think many people would say that these days. As most everyone knows now, DHH, the creator of Rails, has gotten his brain cooked on Twitter and is now a full-blown fascist. This blog post isn’t gonna relitigate that fact. If you think DHH is just a reasonable guy with differing opinions that should be respected, you can close the tab now.

This is a hard fact for me personally to swallow. I love Ruby and Rails, and I even think Rails makes some great technical decisions that have still held up. But every time I read a word DHH says these days, my stomach turns.

What are you supposed to do when your favorite programming language has a fascism problem?

Denial

I wanna tell myself that it’s ok to still use Rails. DHH hasn’t even committed to the Rails repo this whole year. He’s too busy doing a much more important thing: posting racism on the racism app (Twitter).

But Rails is still very much DHH’s project. He owns the trademark. There is no Rails without DHH.

Forks and Hanami

There’s been lots of talk about forking Rails. I’d love for a fork to magically appear and drown out Rails, but we’re so far from that being a reality.

A choice that is a reality today is Hanami. Hanami is a newcomer to the Ruby world. It’s a web framework that thinks very differently than Rails. And I wish it well, but I like the technical decisions in Rails more than Hanami. It’s just not the framework for me.

Moving on

Do I have to move on then? There’s not really a language like Ruby that’s around today. I’ve been playing around with Gleam lately. Gleam is fun! It takes a lot from Elm, another language I liked a lot, and they have a great community. But it just doesn’t fill that same space as Ruby. I like OOP! I like dynamic types! I like metaprogramming! I’ll probably still continue to play with Gleam, but it’s not a Ruby replacement.

Where do I go from here?

If you were hoping for answers in this blog post, I’m sorry, I don’t have any. I’m not sure where I go from here. Maybe a Rails fork will become mainstream. Maybe DHH will leave the project. Maybe a cool new programming language will come along that better fits the Ruby-shaped hole I have. I’m not sure. I just hope if you’re also feeling conflicted about the state of Ruby, just know that you’re not the only one.