Rails is a Ghetto?

January 3, 2008 06:04 PM

I first saw this article from Alan Steven's posts on Twitter, but judging from the fact that I also saw it on Slashdot as well means it's pretty much all around the 'net. Which means there's really no point in me commenting on it, because everything that can be said about it has probably already been said. Especially since I know basically nothing about Rails or its community. But what the heck, I'm going to anyway.

I should mention that if you happen upon this link at work, wait until you get home to read it. Otherwise, your coworkers in the next cube over will likely hear you snickering. Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything.

I hate to admit it, but reading this post gives me a little bit of dark satisfaction. It's not that I don't like Rails; from what I've seen it's not a bad framework, and I really haven't seen enough of it to judge it.

But--and this is the cranky 70-year-old geezer who lives in my head and wants those pesky Web 2.0 kiddies to get off his got-dang lawn talking here--I've always had an aversion to the marketing and to the people who flocked to it.

I think the first thing that bugged me about it was that "fun" was one of its feature bullet-points. Wait, fun? That's not a reason to change your IT department's development platform of choice. What about capabilities? What are your deployment options, and will it require new hardware? Is it going to play nice in your existing environment? How long is it going to take your team to ramp up on it and get back to their current level of productivity if you switch?

To make a long story short, I dealt with people who bought into the hype a little too much. People who thought it would boost productivity to nigh-impossible levels (especially when our productivity was already pretty dang good). People who treated things like unit testing, MVC, or an "agile" philosophy, etc. as if they were new concepts--or worse, miracle cures for other problems in the software development process. People who did not heed the warning that there are no silver bullets. People who thought that Rails was the greatest thing since sliced bread because it was so cutting-edge and pretty much looked down on everything else.

People I had to step in and bail out to some extent after they got in over their head with Rails.

Now, obviously, my bias against Rails is intertwined with other issues. But Zed's article sort of hints that there's certain technologies (or communities surrounding certain technologies) that seem to attract these type of people. And those people are not easy to work with sometimes.

But that's not to say everyone in the Rails community is like that, so it's unfair for me to take any pleasure in Zed's article as some type of dismissal of the technology and its community. I'm the opposite of the Rails fanboy, and my biases don't mean that Rails is an example of how not to do it, it just means it isn't my thing.

I don't need or want to be cutting edge (an attitude which has its own drawbacks, I suppose). I'm more comfortable using something old and familiar that I know how to use right and can accurately gauge its capabilities. Because, really, it's not so much about what you use to create a program (well, unless it's going to make deployment hell), it's about how useful the program is for its intended purpose. (Remember Fred Brooks' division of the essential and accidental elements in the task of programming.) It doesn't matter what framework or platform you use--in the end, it's a tool--one of many, and certainly not some sort of industry-shaping revolution.

And I feel Zed's pain as a guy with a business degree who's often regarded as just a code monkey. Not that I'm particularly good at business either. But that's a whole other story entirely...

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