This post feels awfully pedantic. While it may not be clear to non-Americans, when Americans talk about "Europe", they're generally talking about Western Europe, not Eastern, and are excluding the UK too. They almost certainly aren't including Russia.

(Just like when Americans talk about Asia, they aren't usually thinking of India.)

Of course, that's geographically inaccurate -- but it's what we usually mean. The Europe that Americans refer to does mostly use the Euro, have better-distributed wealth, plenty of consumers, and ambivalent feelings toward entrepreneurs in most of its parts.

Just because Europe is made up of lots of countries, and there are lots of different ways to define it, doesn't mean you can't make statements about it. Perhaps the main point of the post was, be aware that Eastern Europe exists?

What is this post responding to? And who is the target audience?

Reading this feels exactly like reading the passive aggressive facebook posts of someone currently in a fight with their boy/girlfriend. We get it, Rails is "opinionated", sorry I guess we're saying "omakase" these days. Who really gives a fuck?

The reason DHH is getting loud complaints is because people feel that they carry a legitimate grievance but also feel no way to voice that opinion (or are trolls). Douchetastic talking down to them like exemplified in this post won't help (and will encourage trolls).

People with limited knowledge and understanding of something and/or restricted mobility in tech aren't in a place to see things the way you see them. Help them get to that place, instead of just telling them how to see things with metaphors that only work once you're at that place. Or just don't engage them at all.

Edit: Huh. This DHH blog post doesn't really feel on par as a response to the conversation in that github issue. But if it is, know that my post was written assuming the criticism was of the type he describes, not the type that transpired.

Basically, here's the deal: this is a change that every member of Rails core (and others with commit, like me) who is not an employee of 37 Signals disagrees with, as well as the entire maintenance team of Bundler. Every single one. And DHH's response is that we all 'haven't really paid much attention to how things are run on a day-to-day basis.'

This change 'breaks every single new Rails app on Heroku that uses rbenv', in the words of Heroku's Ruby platform lead. It is not a trivial change. This is David going against the wishes of every other maintainer of every other piece of software Rails works with, as well as other Rails maintainers, and then painting their comments as 'nerd rage' and 'organizational failures.'

Ugh.

I can't find it now, but my favourite 'doctor on a plane' story was from an anesthesiologist who struggles to sleep on a plane, so on a long haul flight took something to help him doze off. He woke up to the 'is there a doctor on the plane?' call, and called the flight attendant over. It turned out that he was the person that they wanted to attend to, they were concerned since he was passed out and drooling on the passenger next to him.