If they have not seen farther…
…it is from kicking the shins of the giants around them.
I’ve read a couple of blog entries from folks coming back to Python after jumping on the Rails bandwagon, citing the temperament of the community as one of the reasons.
I never thought much of it, until I read the DHH’s response to Joel Spolsky’s Language Wars article, and the comments that follow. Sure, there are a number of comments that are constructive and forward looking. But you have to look for them. Carefully.
I think that Joel Spolsky has done a lot for the software development community, and was not paid the respect that he deserves in DHH’s response and a multitude of reader comments that followed.
I’ll be honest, I’ve considered jumping on the Rails bandwagon. Several times. The thing that has held me back is the notion that Ruby/RoR hasn’t really gone through its adolescence yet.
If you look at the folks who are doing great things with RoR, lots of them (37Signals, the Pragmatic Programmer guys, etc.) would be writing great software with _any_ tools that they were using. It’s like the fact that Chet Atkins could make a toy guitar sound great.
Maybe it’s my ignorance of the inner workings of the RoR community, but I get the sense that RoR hasn’t had its “holy $#%&” moment, when the hard lessons are learned by average-to-good corporate IT developers, and the sound of pagers at 3AM drowns out the cheers of the language evangelists.
I think that Microsoft had its when they started playing Paper-Scissors-Rock with DCOM and Java. I think that J2EE had its when the Microsoft Pet Shop spanked the canonical best practices of heavy EJB development. Python had its when the momentum of RoR highlighted the fact that there were 80 web frameworks that each did 80% of what people need, and no knee-jerk answer for which one to use for any given application.
But the Rails community? Not so much. I don’t think that the RoR honeymoon is over just yet. Someday it will, and the hard lessons that come will forge the legitimate counter-arguments to Joel’s points.
September 1st, 2006 at 12:34 pm
DHH”s response seemed fair. When I first read Joel’s article I thought it was an elaborate hoax. He basically spends the whole post arguing the convervative positon, but then ends the article stating that one of their flagship products is written in a language with a user base of 1 company. I guess its do as a say, not as I do.
MB
September 1st, 2006 at 1:17 pm
The Joel Wars…
The guy drops something, and hundreds of people become all tizzy, bloggers and developers and forum hang-outs get in a flap, buzzing with excitement. Goodness. James writes:I’ve come across a number of posts listing ways to increase traffic to a…
September 1st, 2006 at 6:22 pm
[…] Although I don't always agree with some of his opinions on programming, Joel Spolsky's marketing skills have to be admired. In his most recent post Language Wars, Joel argues that when it comes to picking a computer language for a project you are best off picking the mainstream language you know best. Nothing revolutionary there.Along the way however he slams LISP and criticizes Ruby for not being suitable for commercial programming, citing failed projects, maturity and performance. As probably anyone who reads this knows, programmers can become extremely devoted to their language of choice (which is silly because .NET is obviously the best) and so they tend to get very fired up when their beloved is insulted. The beauty of Joel's post is he then cleverly baits those that he has annoyed by saying that Fog Creek (his company) has created its own in house language, something that runs completely against picking a safe choice he argued earlier. Subtle tongue in cheek most likely (at least I hope), but at the same time not entirely impossible. Either way Joel doesn't try to explain or justify this paradox in his post and so combines the aggrieved LISP and Ruby developers with ammunition to counter-attack, creating a feeding frenzy of posts, links and hits.I've come across a number of posts listing ways to increase traffic to a blog recently but none have described anything like this. Joel, I salute you! Update:Joel, you have got to be kiddingJoel Gets HammeredLanguage WarsThe Joel WarsIf they have not seen farther…Joel on Language WarsJoel Spolsky run over by train. Pictures at 11.Serious business stuff T-shirtFear, Uncertain[ty], and Doubt by Joel Spolsky (by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails!)Was Joel's Wasabi a joke? (a follow-up by David Heinemeier Hansson) […]
September 2nd, 2006 at 11:48 am
MB:
The problem seems to be that he coined a name for his way of solving a problem. All these knee-jerk responses seem to forget that Wasabi is a _superset_ of features for a common language, VBScript.
These features allow the developers to be able to get the job done faster and easier, with the added benifit of being able to support more platforms than they would if they stuck to one language ( be it .NET / PHP / Ruby whatever ), which is the point behind this “language war”
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:44 pm
[…] How to increase traffic to your blog - the Spolsky way Although I don’t always agree with some of his opinions on programming, Joel Spolsky’s marketing skills have to be admired. In his most recent post Language Wars, Joel argues that when it comes to picking a computer language for a project you are best off picking the mainstream language you know best. Nothing revolutionary there.Along the way however he slams LISP and criticizes Ruby for not being suitable for commercial programming, citing failed projects, maturity and performance. As probably anyone who reads this knows, programmers can become extremely devoted to their language of choice (which is silly because .NET is obviously the best) and so they tend to get very fired up when their beloved is insulted. The beauty of Joel’s post is he then cleverly baits those that he has annoyed by saying that his company has created its own in house language, something that runs completely against picking a safe choice he argued earlier. Subtle tongue in cheek most likely (at least I hope), but at the same time not entirely impossible. Either way Joel doesn’t try to explain or justify this paradox in his post and so combines the aggrieved LISP and Ruby developers with ammunition to counter-attack, creating a feeding frenzy of posts, links and hits.I’ve come across a number of posts listing ways to increase traffic to a blog recently but none have described anything like this. Joel, I salute you! Update:Joel, you have got to be kiddingJoel Gets HammeredLanguage WarsThe Joel WarsIf they have not seen farther…Joel on Language WarsJoel Spolsky run over by train. Pictures at 11.Serious business stuff T-shirtFear, Uncertain[ty], and Doubt by Joel Spolsky (by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails!)Was Joel’s Wasabi a joke? (a follow-up by David Heinemeier Hansson)Update Part Deux:Wasabi (by Joel. It’s real)Joel, Languages, and Genius Mark[et]ingJoel’s Wasabi: not a bad idea.Net: He will join us or die […]