What do you do when your favorite programming language has a fascism problem?

# Code and Cake - What do you do when your favorite programming language has a fascism problem? Source: [https://codeandcake.dev/posts/2026-09-03-what-do-you-do](https://codeandcake.dev/posts/2026-09-03-what-do-you-do) Ruby is my favorite programming language\. It’s a great language and nothing really comes close to it in terms of expressiveness\. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s mine\. The Ruby community used to be known as being very friendly\. I don’t think many people would say that these days\. As most everyone knows now, DHH, the creator of Rails, has gotten his brain cooked on Twitter and is now a full\-blown fascist\. This blog post isn’t gonna relitigate that fact\. If you think DHH is just a reasonable guy with differing opinions that should be respected, you can close the tab now\. This is a hard fact for me personally to swallow\. I love Ruby and Rails, and I even think Rails makes some great technical decisions that have still held up\. But every time I read a word DHH says these days, my stomach turns\. What are you supposed to do when your favorite programming language has a fascism problem? ## Denial I wanna tell myself that it’s ok to still use Rails\.[DHH hasn’t even committed to the Rails repo this whole year\.](https://github.com/rails/rails/commits?author=dhh&since=2026-01-01&until=2026-09-03)He’s too busy doing a much more important thing: posting racism on the racism app \(Twitter\)\. But Rails is still very much DHH’s project\. He owns[the trademark](https://rubyonrails.org/trademarks)\. There is no Rails without DHH\. ## Forks and Hanami There’s been lots of talk about[forking](https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter)[Rails](https://mosscap.dev/)\. I’d love for a fork to magically appear and drown out Rails, but we’re so far from that being a reality\. A choice that*is*a reality today is[Hanami](https://github.com/hanami/hanami)\. Hanami is a newcomer to the Ruby world\. It’s a web framework that thinks very differently than Rails\. And I wish it well, but I like the technical decisions in Rails more than Hanami\. It’s just not the framework for me\. ## Moving on Do I have to move on then? There’s not really a language like Ruby that’s around today\. I’ve been playing around with[Gleam](https://gleam.run/)lately\. Gleam is fun\! It takes a lot from Elm, another language I liked a lot, and they have a great community\. But it just doesn’t fill that same space as Ruby\. I*like*OOP\! I*like*dynamic types\! I*like*metaprogramming\! I’ll probably still continue to play with Gleam, but it’s not a Ruby replacement\. ## Where do I go from here? If you were hoping for answers in this blog post, I’m sorry, I don’t have any\. I’m not sure where I go from here\. Maybe a Rails fork will become mainstream\. Maybe DHH will leave the project\. Maybe a cool new programming language will come along that better fits the Ruby\-shaped hole I have\. I’m not sure\. I just hope if you’re also feeling conflicted about the state of Ruby, just know that you’re not the only one\.