Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here, and that he is just spelling out the reality that developers are, or shortly will be, facing. For many this will be deeply uncomfortable to hear.
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
> Concerns with his politics aside, I do think there's a truth to what he's talking about here
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
With his infamous "As I remember London" article [1] he directly correlated skin colour to nationality leading to the claim that native Brits had dropped from 60% to a third.
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
>So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
His exact words from the blog:
"In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact. He did not interpret this fact incorrectly.
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960.
Now it is around 50%, and falling.
Again, source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
Is that good or bad? Leave that one up for debate, I mostly care about facts.
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not simply “ethnic English”).
But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a ninteeen-hundred-year old working international port city, it has had a large population of Jews of European descent for centuries (the first large community being so notable that they were discriminated against in Magna Carta, after all), various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.
In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees and their immediate descendants made up perhaps ten per cent of the population of London (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15% depending on the boundary definition you choose and that at the time of their arrival the UK had no formal immigration policy so no exact numbers — but over 200,000 settled in mainland Britain). A truly astonishing number arrived and the city simply made room. But they didn’t leave; they assimilated. Same thing happened with Dutch exile craftsmen.
This happens a lot in London’s history: <a href="https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HistoryofContributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Historyof...
So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.
People just have no grasp of the nearly unique reality of London as a historical melting pot. By 1960 its diversity was eclipsed by American cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but this idea that London was somehow traditionally “ethnically British” to the point of being a quaint monoculture is fully crackers. Just not true. The difference since 1960 is just more visible because we started adding more literal colour from the Commonwealth.
A place worth visiting for Brits who don't believe this and tourists who are interested:
robgough · · focus · HN ↗
It is notable that his perspective in this talk is very much from a developer-user side rather than someone who is responsible for the framework itself. That surprises me, and I suspect it is not a good omen for Rails.
For all of this embrace of agentic development, there is nothing here on how they are adapting the framework for this new agentic development reality. Agents do currently work well with Rails, but there's nothing here pushing things forward as best as I can see.
I know for my own projects I've largely moved to Elixir/Phoenix, for similar reasons to his use of Rust... I didn't want to have to learn it, but now I don't have to and I get to benefit from its strengths.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
One thing the AI era has changed for me is how easily I spot Gell-Mann amnesia, of which this is an unfortunately strong example.
His politics, even putting aside their nature, are framed with deliberate misuse of facts and data; why would he be someone to listen to in any depth on any other topic?
diego_sandoval · · focus · HN ↗
Any specific examples? I am/was out of the loop on this and had to Google "DHH politics" to know what people are talking about.
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
If you check now using current sources the British-born population is still around 59% the only thing that has changed is that fewer people identify themselves on the census as 'White British' which has a host of reasons around it. So he took a misleading statistic, interpreted it incorrectly and then built some kind of nostalgic story around it to support what was essentially an excuse to support far-right thugs protesting.
[1] <a href="https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64" rel="nofollow">https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64
throwawayfifo · · focus · HN ↗
His exact words from the blog:
"In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third."
White Brits are the only native/indigenous Brits to London. It's not misleading, it's just a fact. He did not interpret this fact incorrectly.
rossriley · · focus · HN ↗
shadowtree · · focus · HN ↗
You're mixing nationality, a piece of paper, with being "native", an ethnic group. Does not work in countries across Europe, Japan, Korea, etc. The settling of the USA and its cultural dominance has broken peoples brains. Europe is inhabited by its indigenous people!
The English are an ethnic group (ask 23andMe) and they are the founding stock of Great Britain. Source - the far right extremist wikipedia: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_people
London was 97.7% white in 1960. Now it is around 50%, and falling. Again, source: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_London
Is that good or bad? Leave that one up for debate, I mostly care about facts.
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t actually believe this statistic, as an aside, but if we stipulate that it is true, it still doesn’t remotely mean 97.7% “ethnic English”. That’s a radically wrong implication.
It’s a little closer to DHH’s point about the percentage of British people (the Welsh, Scots and Northern Irish are not simply “ethnic English”).
But it’s still very wrong. At that point it was a ninteeen-hundred-year old working international port city, it has had a large population of Jews of European descent for centuries (the first large community being so notable that they were discriminated against in Magna Carta, after all), various displaced populations after WWI and WWII, a very large Irish population, thousands of Italians, many Dutch.
In the 1800s French Huguenot refugees and their immediate descendants made up perhaps ten per cent of the population of London (figures vary, considerably, could be 3% or nearer 15% depending on the boundary definition you choose and that at the time of their arrival the UK had no formal immigration policy so no exact numbers — but over 200,000 settled in mainland Britain). A truly astonishing number arrived and the city simply made room. But they didn’t leave; they assimilated. Same thing happened with Dutch exile craftsmen.
This happens a lot in London’s history: <a href="https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/HistoryofContributions.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://refugeeweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Historyof...
So he is wrong (and IMO ought to have known some of this) and you are not at all on the right track either.
People just have no grasp of the nearly unique reality of London as a historical melting pot. By 1960 its diversity was eclipsed by American cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but this idea that London was somehow traditionally “ethnically British” to the point of being a quaint monoculture is fully crackers. Just not true. The difference since 1960 is just more visible because we started adding more literal colour from the Commonwealth.
A place worth visiting for Brits who don't believe this and tourists who are interested:
<a href="https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/" rel="nofollow">https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/docklands/
Super-cool museum space dedicated to London as a port city.