That article spends a lot of words in trying to paint DHH's "native Brits" in a positive light but never mentions the following sentence from the article:
> A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
How is DHH able to determine nativity as defined by "being born and brought up" simply walking the streets of London if it has nothing to do with what you look like?
Plus he even links to a Wikipedia page about white vs non-white British population in London and uses the non-white number. If he wanted to, he could've referred to the foreign-born vs local-born numbers too but he did not.
I don't think DHH is racist, but he's so infected by the anti-woke mind virus that he's happy to parrot racist talking points to "own the libs". Whether that's any better, I'm not sure.
It seems like the author has infinite rope to extend to DHH. That's not being nice, that's being oblivious.
DHH didn't refer to foreign-born because that's not what he was talking about. I made it very clear in the article that this is a perfectly valid definition of "native": "living or growing naturally in a particular region : indigenous".
You are not even trying to understand what DHH is saying.
This is the problem with modern discourse: people don't even listen. You don't care what DHH meant, all you care about is the hedges on speech you want to impose on others.
Of course, but I know people who live in the UK who are not white. Some have lived there all their lives, even. Perhaps this drivel doesn't upset them but I can imagine how it might.
Unfortunately DHH is not going to be focused on the UK only. He'll lend his voice to the next rightwing ragebait without consideration of people who he works with on the daily. He had some very strong but entirely misinformed opinions about my hometown a few years ago and it was extremely annoying to read that from an ostensibly intelligent person while being in the middle of everything.
If he was some random guy, it wouldn't be such an issue but given he's the leader of a big open source project, everything he says gets a lot of publicity and frankly causes a lot of distraction for people just trying to do work on or with Rails.
It seems unlikely to me that DHH wasn’t referring to white people when he said “native Brit”. Certainly, if that’s not what he meant, he could clear that up pretty easily. Has he?
Other people are free to ignore politics or look at counteracting viewpoints: https://felipec.wordpress.com/2025/09/23/the-ruby-community-...