I started writing Ruby code just before David Heinemeier Hansson released Rails, back when the framework felt truly revolutionary for the time. Rails changed everything for me and countless other developers. It made crafting for the web joyful and created entirely new opportunities. The entire development world owes DHH a debt of gratitude for giving it to us.

Yet somewhere along the way, DHH seems to have forgotten that his technical contributions don’t give him a free pass to spread harmful rhetoric that drives people away from the very community he helped build. As I sit here today, watching someone I once admired slowly poison the well they helped create is heartbreaking beyond words.

His recent blog posts have crossed lines that shouldn’t exist in any welcoming technical community. Writing about London being “only a third native Brit” is way more than just tone-deaf commentary. It’s actively harmful to the many Ruby developers who aren’t white or weren’t born in traditionally western countries. You can argue that it’s not coded racist language, but I will strongly disagree with you. When DHH celebrates “blond babies” in advertisements or describes plus-sized Black women as “grotesque,” he’s telling entire groups of people exactly who he is, and that they don’t belong.

The pattern extends beyond racial issues, too. His statements targeting transgender people most definitely create an environment where talented developers will feel unwelcome simply because of who they are. This isn’t about political correctness or cancel culture. It’s about basic human decency and creating spaces where everyone can contribute their best work.

Ruby has always prided itself on being different. Matz’s principle of optimizing for programmer happiness wasn’t just about syntax and semantics. It was about building a language and ecosystem where developers could thrive. DHH’s increasingly toxic rhetoric undermines that foundation. When newcomers research Ruby and Rails, they don’t just find technical documentation. They find DHH’s inflammatory posts and might reasonably conclude this isn’t a community where they’d be welcome.

The silence from Ruby’s leadership has been deafening. While individual community members like Tekin Süleyman have courageously spoken out, the institutional response has been minimal. Ruby “hostility” Central, Rails Core team members, and prominent conference organizers have largely stayed quiet, perhaps hoping the controversy will pass. It won’t. Each time DHH escalates his rhetoric without consequence, he becomes more emboldened.

This isn’t about removing DHH from Rails development entirely. That’s neither realistic nor necessarily desirable from a technical standpoint. But the community desperately needs to establish that technical contributions don’t grant immunity from criticism when someone actively harms the ecosystem’s culture and inclusivity. Those same contributions certainly do not earn continual platforming of such a hateful person.

The most effective path forward involves multiple strategies. Conference organizers should reconsider featuring DHH as a keynote speaker, especially when his presence might alienate attendees. Rails Core team members and Ruby Central leadership need to publicly distance themselves from his harmful rhetoric while affirming the community’s commitment to inclusion. Corporate sponsors should make their expectations clear about representing the values they want associated with their brands.

Most importantly, we need new voices in leadership positions. The Ruby community has hundreds of brilliant developers who could champion the language’s future without the baggage DHH brings. Ruby deserves better stewardship, and the community deserves leaders who understand that welcoming everyone makes us all stronger. True leaders who understand that growing a programming language requires growing its community, not shrinking it through bigoted and exclusionary rhetoric.

A project’s future shouldn’t be held hostage by one person’s increasingly problematic worldview. The language and Rails framework are bigger than any single individual, even their creator. It’s time for the community to act like it and chart a path forward that honors Ruby’s inclusive spirit while moving beyond the toxicity that threatens to define its legacy.

Ruby has grown into something truly beautiful. We can’t let it be destroyed by someone who tears others down, and seemingly forgot that programmer happiness applies to all programmers, not just the ones who look and think like him.