To DHH credit, he always has fair points in his opinions, but the way he expresses these points is never diplomatic. For example, he couldn't resist making some blanket statements about java world and rspec.
I am not sure about how intentional that is, but it surely is dramatical in 'flame war eliciting' sense of word.
The JAva point I felt was truly fair here. Servlets were good, but then it became the huge EJB which was bad. His rspec opinion - as expressed here that is - was "I dont like the DSL". Those seem fine really.
Just as a pointer I would recommend to get up to date with latest JEE specs and standards before making judgement
What I see is most people base their opinion on EJB2 from past and they keep ranting about that. Also java ecosystem doesn't start and end with JEE
Come on! They scrapped almost everything because it sucked and everyone knew it. Judging EJBs as a pile of shit is quite deserving. I mean this as a programmer who wrote Java code for a living.
Presumed effect is merely fortune-telling. Xentronium said nothing about the java and rspec arguments themselves, just that something was said with what they think is an undiplomatic tone.
The notion that you cannot criticize somebody for the probable consequences of their actions is idiocy. Especially given the track record of DHH-driven flame wars in the past.
He also did say something about those specific arguments: that they were blanket. Which I took to mean: shallow and over-broad.
To whatever degree flamewars result here, they are historically not flamewars per se, but people arguing over tone. And I'm no statistician, but I would question the GP's probability calculations.
The way to avoid flame wars is not to feed them in anticipation, but to offer a critical beatdown of the arguments at hand, e.g. the higher levels of the PG pyramid.
It's inherent in everything the Ruby community does - sooner or later someone will come along and write a 14 page diatribe about how DHH is full of shit and then flounce out in a cloud of opprobrium.
I am not sure about how intentional that is, but it surely is dramatical in 'flame war eliciting' sense of word.