…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.
