It doesn’t matter whether “Matz is nice”

“Matz 是否友善”并不重要

I’ve met Matz once, I think, at EuRuKo in Krakow in 2010. We chatted briefly in Japanese. He seemed nice, but also quiet and reserved. At the time, he didn’t speak much English; perhaps he could speak more and just wasn’t particularly confident, but he didn’t. 我想我曾在 2010 年克拉科夫的 EuRuKo 大会上见过 Matz 一次。我们用日语简短地聊了几句。他看起来很友善，但也安静而内敛。当时他的英语说得不多；也许他其实会说，只是不太自信，但他确实没怎么说。

Yukihiro Matsumoto, aka Matz, is the creator and chief designer of the Ruby programming language. He isn’t outspoken, he doesn’t make many pronouncements outside the strictly technical arena, and he conducts most of his online life in Japanese. That provides a space onto which to project anything, and that gave us a motto of the Ruby programming community: MINASWAN (“Matz is nice and so we are nice”). 松本行弘（Yukihiro Matsumoto），即 Matz，是 Ruby 编程语言的创造者和首席设计师。他不善言辞，在纯技术领域之外很少发表声明，且大部分在线活动都使用日语。这为人们提供了一个可以投射任何想法的空间，也因此诞生了 Ruby 社区的座右铭：MINASWAN（“Matz 很友善，所以我们也友善”）。

I’m not saying that Matz isn’t nice, but the “Matz is nice” trope was only ever projection, and in the end it doesn’t matter, because if we’re honest, we must conclude that the Ruby community is not “nice”. Two of the most obvious “not nice” but powerful people in Ruby are David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, and Tobias Lütke, and Matz shares a stage with both of them. 我并不是说 Matz 不友善，但“Matz 很友善”这一说法始终只是一种投射。归根结底，这并不重要，因为如果我们诚实面对，就必须承认 Ruby 社区并不“友善”。在 Ruby 社区中，两位最显眼且极具影响力但并不“友善”的人物是 David Heinemeier Hansson（即 DHH）和 Tobias Lütke，而 Matz 与他们两人同台共事。

Let’s take DHH first. He is the creator of and prime mover behind the Ruby on Rails framework. Rails is Ruby’s success story, and represents the vast majority of Ruby development and deployment. It has given me much of my paid work for the past couple of decades. DHH owns the Ruby on Rails trademark and is, in effect, the dictator for life of the project. 先说说 DHH。他是 Ruby on Rails 框架的创造者和主要推动者。Rails 是 Ruby 的成功典范，代表了绝大多数的 Ruby 开发与部署工作。在过去的几十年里，它为我提供了大部分的收入来源。DHH 拥有 Ruby on Rails 的商标，实际上也是该项目的终身独裁者。

He was a controversial figure in the early days of his Ruby fame. He’s noisy, he’s reactionary, he’s anti-intellectual, he’s very sure that he is right, and he enjoys being rude. But who among us has not been an idiot in their youth? He seemed to grow up, calm down, chill out, and for a time even espoused inclusive policies and ideas. 在 Ruby 成名初期，他就是一个充满争议的人物。他吵闹、反动、反智，坚信自己永远正确，并且乐于表现得粗鲁。但我们谁年轻时没犯过傻呢？他似乎成长了，冷静了下来，变得随和，甚至一度支持包容性的政策和理念。

More recently, however, he has pivoted his entire online personality to being obdurately “anti-woke”, and started to publish pieces that are increasingly, unarguably, white nationalist and far right in tone and content, lauding Stephen Yaxley-Lennon dba Tommy Robinson, attacking immigrants and other minorities, and generally revelling inelling in reactionary bigotry. 然而最近，他将自己的在线形象彻底转向了顽固的“反觉醒”（anti-woke），并开始发表在基调和内容上越来越无可辩驳地带有白人至上主义和极右翼色彩的文章，赞美 Stephen Yaxley-Lennon（即 Tommy Robinson），攻击移民和其他少数群体，并沉溺于反动的偏执之中。

“As I remember London” should be a wake-up call for everyone in the Ruby and Rails communities. This is not a man who wants to keep going. This is a man who romanticizes a past that was predominantly good for white men. This is a man who has spent years railing against diversity, equity and inclusion and who spreads anti-trans rhetoric. This is a man who is deeply afraid of immigration changing countries’ cultures and “national identities”, despite this kind of change being a constant for the whole of human history. This is a man who is a white nationalist. And he is in sole control of Rails, this framework we all love. 《正如我记忆中的伦敦》（As I remember London）一文应该给 Ruby 和 Rails 社区的所有人敲响警钟。这并不是一个想要继续前行的人，而是一个美化过去——那个主要对白人男性有利的时代——的人。他多年来一直抨击多元化、公平和包容（DEI），并散布反跨性别言论。他深切地恐惧移民会改变国家的文化和“民族认同”，尽管这种改变在整个人类历史上都是常态。他是一个白人至上主义者，而他却完全掌控着我们所热爱的 Rails 框架。

Unfortunately it isn’t just migrants and non-white people that have come under fire in DHH’s recent writing and social media posts. There have been multiple examples of anti-trans rhetoric. There was the post where he described an ad featuring a plus-sized Black women as “grotesque” and celebrated the ads being replaced with ones featuring “blond babies” (what is it about the baby’s blondness that is relevant I wonder?). There have been the posts veering into puritanical Pronatalism, another favourite subject of the nationalist right. Whether it’s his direct intention or not, there has been a consistent theme of othering and stigmatising in his recent writing. 不幸的是，在 DHH 最近的文章和社交媒体帖子中，受到攻击的不仅仅是移民和非白人。他多次发表反跨性别言论。他曾发帖将一则以大码黑人女性为主角的广告描述为“怪诞”，并庆祝该广告被换成以“金发婴儿”为主角的广告（我很好奇，婴儿的金发与此有何关联？）。还有一些帖子转向了清教徒式的“生育主义”（Pronatalism），这是民族主义右翼的另一个心头好。无论他是否有意为之，他近期的文章中始终贯穿着一种“他者化”和污名化的主题。

In the past few weeks, DHH has gone much further, calling for “remigration”, the euphemism for mass deportation of citizens used by the far right. Because the sacred cow here is not just that mass migration must stop going forward. It’s also that millions who are already in Europe must go. Remigration has gone from a fringe concept to the mainstream discourse in record time on account of that realization. He has also, most recently, compared Roma people to wolves that need to be shot, and then got very upset when an LLM refused to translate it because it was “dehumanizing towards an ethnic group”. 在过去几周里，DHH 走得更远，他呼吁“再移民”（remigration）——这是极右翼用来指代大规模驱逐公民的委婉语。因为这里的“神圣不可侵犯”不仅在于必须停止未来的大规模移民，还在于必须驱逐数百万已经身在欧洲的人。由于这种认知，“再移民”在极短时间内从一个边缘概念变成了主流话语。最近，他甚至将罗姆人比作需要被射杀的狼，当大语言模型（LLM）因其“对特定族群非人化”而拒绝翻译该内容时，他感到非常愤怒。

You don’t gotta hand it to the LLMs, but on this occasion, fair play. When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn’t hard, it isn’t cruel. It’s the basic logic of self-preservation. As Emily Gorcenski pithily observed: just figured out what the HH in DHH stands for. （原文此处引用了 DHH 的言论：）“你不需要佩服大语言模型，但在这种情况下，它们做得对。当狼群失控时，你就射杀它们。当吉普赛人占领公共空间时，你就驱逐他们。这并不难，也不残忍。这是自我保护的基本逻辑。”正如 Emily Gorcenski 尖锐地指出的那样：我终于明白 DHH 中的 HH 代表什么了。

Hansson is also a board member of Shopify, a company that provides hosted online shops, and who you may know from 10,000 annoying podcast ads. Shopify employs five of the ten foremost current human (we’ll get to that) contributors to the Ruby language. It is the largest sponsor of the Ruby Central organisation, and exercises a great deal of de facto control over the Ruby ecosystem as a result. Hansson 还是 Shopify 的董事会成员，这是一家提供在线商店托管服务的公司，你可能从那成千上万个烦人的播客广告中听说过它。Shopify 雇佣了目前 Ruby 语言十位最主要的人类（稍后我们会谈到这一点）贡献者中的五位。它是 Ruby Central 组织最大的赞助商，因此对 Ruby 生态系统行使着巨大的事实控制权。

When Sidekiq withdrew their sponsorship after Ruby Central announced DHH as a speaker at the final RailsConf – the final RailsConf because Hansson, piqued at not being invited to a previous year, had set up his own rival Rails World conference – Shopify pushed Ruby Central to take over full control of RubyGems in a very murky series of events. Shopify’s technical and labour contribution to Ruby has been significant and valuable; however, along with its financial contribution, this has given it a great deal of power and control over the language. 当 Ruby Central 宣布 DHH 将在最后一届 RailsConf 上演讲后，Sidekiq 撤回了赞助——之所以是“最后一届”，是因为 Hansson 因前一年未受邀请而心生不满，自行创办了竞争对手会议 Rails World——在一系列极其模糊的事件中，Shopify 推动 Ruby Central 接管了 RubyGems 的完全控制权。Shopify 对 Ruby 的技术和人力贡献是重大且有价值的；然而，伴随着其财务贡献，这也使其对该语言拥有了巨大的权力和控制力。

Billionaire Tobias Lütke is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify. In 2022, against the wishes of 46% of shareholders, he was granted a “founder’s share” giving him 40% voting power. This week, he’s in the news for endorsing the idea that rich people should get more electoral power. Shopify has long been infamous for hosting the online store of far-right publication Breitbart (along with other right wing publications and vendors of Nazi memorabilia). They have defended this as supporting free speech, but there has always been a suspicion that there might be more alignment than that. Shopify’s COO until 2025, Kaz Nejatian, was behind a Canadian right-wing anti-immigrant website. In January 2025, shortly after Donald Tru… 亿万富翁 Tobias Lütke 是 Shopify 的联合创始人兼 CEO。2022 年，他不顾 46% 股东的反对，获得了一份赋予他 40% 投票权的“创始人股份”。本周，他因支持“富人应拥有更多选举权”的观点而登上新闻。Shopify 因托管极右翼刊物 Breitbart（以及其他右翼出版物和纳粹纪念品供应商）的在线商店而长期臭名昭著。他们辩称这是为了支持言论自由，但人们一直怀疑这背后可能存在更深层的认同。Shopify 直至 2025 年的首席运营官 Kaz Nejatian，曾是加拿大一家右翼反移民网站的幕后推手。2025 年 1 月，在 Donald Tru…（原文截断）