The title card of Tom Stuart’s presentation, The DHH Problem.
Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.
The DHH Problem
Back in 2014, Tom Stuart delivered a pithy yet salient lightning talk at the Scottish Ruby Conference titled The DHH Problem, in which he succinctly describes the character of David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails. I recommend watching it because, in just three and a half minutes, he effectively provides context on who DHH was, who he still is, and why his future shift to the right would make so much sense and be so unsurprising. But, if you’d rather not, I’ll include a transcript below:
DHH is an intelligent and successful person. DHH invented Rails, and now I can get paid for writing Ruby, even though I enjoy it. So: thanks, DHH (sincerely). But, there’s a problem. DHH is “Ruby Famous”, which means that DHH is extremely visible (some might say disproportionately visible) in the Ruby community. Why is that a problem? Because DHH is the Fox News of Ruby. He’s noisy, he’s reactionary, he’s anti-intellectual, he’s very sure that he is right, and he enjoys being rude. [Tom cuts to a photo of DHH delivering a conference talk in 2006, standing in front of a slide that just says “Fuck You”] That was eight years ago, but things haven’t changed much. Just like Fox News, DHH appeals to “common sense” and makes a show of being “fair and balanced” but, in reality, his arguments use aggressive rhetoric and rely on a fixed viewpoint. To paint a topical example, is TDD hard in Rails apps because TDD is dead, or because Rails makes TDD hard? Is TDD not worth the effort because TDD is dead, or because the complexity of software can be managed more effectively if you only work on one product for which you control the requirements? If we only listen to DHH, then we’ll never know, because DHH is just one person and he only has DHH’s experiences. All I’m saying is: the Ruby community is large and diverse and thoughtful, and that is why I love it. Please listen to DHH: his experiences are valuable. But DHH does not speak for me, and he probably doesn’t speak for you. My personal preference is for a bit less of this [Tom cuts back to the photo of DHH’s “Fuck You” slide] and a bit more of this [he then cuts to a different man delivering a conference talk, standing in front of a slide that says “What others do may be the stimulus of our feelings, but never the cause.”] Please give DHH’s opinions the weight they deserve: they are what one man thinks. And if you disagree with him, please speak up—write a blog post, give a talk, create a web framework—so that we can all learn what the world looks like to you.
That was eleven years ago, but things haven’t changed much. DHH is still noisy, still reactionary, still anti-intellectual, still very sure that he is right, and still enjoys being rude. You need only look at his personal blog to witness this yourself, but doing so isn’t for the faint of heart; this iteration of DHH’s blog on Hey World started a mere four years ago but, in that time, he’s written 476 posts on a variety of topics. That’s too many posts for a deep dive, but the broad trends show a reactionary who has moved, at times steadily and at times quickly, to the far right.
Early on, DHH comes off as a man who held a variety of political beliefs. He would write about the dire state of our climate and then, a couple weeks later, drop hints of an increasingly present narrative around cancel culture. Early posts on this blog tended to follow a theme of his “natural political stance” ostensibly being left-leaning, while being open to right-wing views as a way to “find common ground”. I’ll be honest and say that I’m not sure I believe that he was ever truly left-leaning. My own observations show someone who is fairly centrist or even slightly right of center, which tracks with what standard Liberalism has become in America.
Over the next few years, we’d see posts from DHH covering a range of far-right talking points: anti-wokeness, anti-DEI, free speech absolutism, support of figures who range from right-leaning (like Joe Rogan) to far-right (like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson), to anti-trans fearmongering, all the way to outright nationalism (this post may seem innocuous on its face, but hints at his inability to recognize hate speech as violence and includes the common dog whistle of countries having a “strong national identity”). He rails against finding beauty in diversity rather than what’s “normal” or in people of all sizes. But what I find most indicative of DHH’s shift (whether towards the right, or towards honesty that he’s always been on the right) comes from a quote in one of his earliest posts on this blog, Legacy without nostalgia:
I’m just not a nostalgic person. In fact, I’m deeply skeptical of nostalgia. It too often feels like a trap to romanticize the past at the expense of the future. If you fall in love with who you once were, it’s too easy to forget to keep going. I want to keep going.
This is deeply ironic given just how much DHH thirsts for nostalgia in his later posts. He frequently yearns for the world of the past, especially the 80s (but not the 90s, which he hates), before all of this pesky talk about DEI, before cancel culture, before “pessimism”. But no post encompasses this hypocritical desire for nostalgia more than his essay from a few days ago, As I remember London, a post which disturbingly echoes the sentiments of the Ku Klux Kreed: Denmark for the Danes, Britain for the Brits, Japan for the Japanese. Given Britain’s long history of multiculturalism, I wonder what DHH would say is the defining characteristic of “native Brits”? It also declares his support of one of Britain’s most prominent far-right activists, Tommy Robinson.
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