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2026-07-29

It doesn’t matter whether “Matz is nice”

This SWAN is cooked

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.

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”).

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.

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. 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.

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 in reactionary bigotry.

“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.

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.

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”. 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

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. 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.

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 Trump’s second election win, Shopify terminated their support programme for Indigenous entrepreneurs and their One Million Black Businesses initiative, and then in February closed the Slack channel that had allowed participants to stay in touch. The members of the equitable commerce team left the company without explanation. Despite being a Canadian (by naturalisation) running a Canadian company, Lütke seems to be increasingly aligned with Trump.

you are right that there was stuff spreading everywhere so I guess the initial assertion is true that there was a lot of woke stuff at Shopify, but it was never sanctioned.

Lütke doesn’t say anything nearly as incendiary as DHH, but the actions of the company he controls tell their own story, and his posts on X, the Everything App, document his turn to the right, along with all the crypto and AI stuff you’d expect to go along with it.

He gave Hansson a seat on Shopify’s board long after the latter had started on his anti-“DEI”, anti-immigrant theme. Lütke also recently reposted DHH writing about “not caving to the woke mob”. That’s more than just tacit acceptance.

I hope the move to fork Rails succeeds, but while it’s necessary, I’m not sure it’s sufficient while Ruby as a whole is substantially controlled by the same people.

Meanwhile, what of Ruby? The second most prolific contributor to the Ruby codebase in the last six months is Claude. Is this even worth salvaging?