> Oh, and this was similarly obnoxious (if not said tongue-in-cheek): Your developers stare blankly or say 3 "Hail Marys" when they hear the name "Zed Shaw": Scala == Hard
That basically means if you follow technical news, and cutting edge stuff, you have most likely heard of him - for his software(mongrel2, lamson), his books, his essays(rails is a ghetto, programming motherfuckers). Mongrel was a big deal some time back, and still is in the rails world, and rails is a big deal; all these factors kinda make Zed a known name.
If you don't know Zed, that's not a big deal - no one gives a fuck about Zed. But not knowing Zed here is weakly implying(not necessarily though) you have been living under a rock and you aren't familiar with Rails, Mongrel2 etc, which is not a good thing IMO.
Cutting edge means "latest or advanced stage of development". Rails was miles ahead of existing frameworks when it first came into scene. Rails was cutting edge, and it needed a stable application server - mongrel filled that niche.
And a small niche in the computing world can very well be cutting edge.
Please. Zed's fame (or rather notoriety) doesn't come from Mongrel (never heard of lamson) and afaik his main association with Rails is the famous rant. Can you name off the top of your head some of the core developers of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, JBoss, Hadoop, Gnome and a dozen others more important FOSS projects? I can't, and yet this doesn't say anything about both the significance of said projects and my familiarity with them.
Significance - no. Familiarity - I'd say yes. Unfortunately I don't know the projects you mentioned that well, so I can't say anything about them. But from the projects I do deal with (either developers or people related to project in some way):
- Python: van Rossum, Beazley, ...
- Mono: de Icaza
- Mysql: Monty Widenius
- Ruby: Katz, Shaw, Bini, ...
- Chef: Matt Ray
...
Yes - I do believe that if you claim serious knowledge about some project, but can't name anyone involved into that project in one way or another, there's something weird going on. Typically you'd run into some reoccurring name while looking through bugs, mailing lists, manuals, etc.
> I do believe that if you claim serious knowledge about some project, but can't name anyone involved into that project in one way or another, there's something weird going on.
Even if this is true (which is debatable at best), it's a long stretch from the blogger's aphorism "If you don't know $VOCAL_DIVA_PROGRAMMER, Scala==hard". He obviously doesn't imply you should be familiar with Mongrel to have a chance to become good in Scala.
All this nonsense would be unnecessary if the author made his point by mentioning, say, "referential transparency" or "map-reduce" instead of "Zed Shaw".
I agree with your opinion this part of the article is silly/wrong. Then again, I was responding directly to the parent's claim, rather than "commending on the article through responding to the parent" ;)
> Can you name off the top of your head some of the core developers of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, JBoss, Hadoop, Gnome and a dozen others more important FOSS projects? I can't, and yet this doesn't say anything about both the significance of said projects and my familiarity with them.
It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth. Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman etc. are known because the projects they work on are important and we use them, and they are vocal, and sometimes arrogant about their projects.
Though Zed isn't in the same league, the same goes for him. He was associated with an important project, and he created controversy while he was associated with that project. You can write articles on "Rails is a ghetto" or "Django is a ghetto" or "Java sucks", and you won't be getting any coverage unless you already are a somewhat known name in the community. Zed's notoriety doesn't directly stem from the essay.
> It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth.
True, but the point is many/most people have heard of Zed without knowing or ever using his project(s). On the other hand the number of people who know Linus as the creator of Linux is orders of magnitude larger than those who also happen to know he's sometimes arrogant.
That basically means if you follow technical news, and cutting edge stuff, you have most likely heard of him - for his software(mongrel2, lamson), his books, his essays(rails is a ghetto, programming motherfuckers). Mongrel was a big deal some time back, and still is in the rails world, and rails is a big deal; all these factors kinda make Zed a known name.
If you don't know Zed, that's not a big deal - no one gives a fuck about Zed. But not knowing Zed here is weakly implying(not necessarily though) you have been living under a rock and you aren't familiar with Rails, Mongrel2 etc, which is not a good thing IMO.