Empowering the incompetent
Perhaps that’s too harsh, but after reading one of Glyph’s posts about how Penny Arcade is going down the tubes, I can’t help but think of a horribly bastardized version of something form Edsgar Djikstra: You can write horrible code in any language.
Basically, I think what you’re seeing is poor programming skills being amplified by a framework that allows you to be efficient. Unlike most of the enterprisey world, which is hell-bent on holding your hand, foot, and every other dangling body part—lest you hurt yourself—Rails and Ruby are quite easily used to shoot yourself in the foot. This is also true of Lisp, Smalltalk and a lot of other tools that are extremely powerful.
This is slightly tongue in cheek, though: it can’t possibly all be Rails’s fault. It wasn’t anything to write home about in PHP either. How do they manage to consistently screw this up? It’s a web page with a paragraph of text and a single image, updated at most twice per day. It’s not rocket science; it’s not even computer science. It’s barely a shell script.
With great power comes great opportunity: to screw up. I actually have no idea why it’s going wrong, but as Glyph observes, this site isn’t rocket science, and there’s a lot of very cool and amazing sites written in Rails (and Python frameworks, like Twisted), so it’s likely to be the people. And in the end, it’s always the people.
This entry was posted at 1:09 pm on 27 June 2006 and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
I think that the comparison is apt. Desktop publishing, like advanced tools on computers for development, have only allowed the lack of competence to come to the fore. Before DP, publishing something was a relatively high bar, and by lowering that bar, we’ve reduced the barrier to entry. Overall, that’s a good thing, but it does increase the noise level.
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Is it incompetence or just a bandwagon desire to be one of the cool kids working in Rails? Print design has been going through the same thing for years. Having access to a PC and some cut-rate desktop publishing programs does not make you a designer any more than compiling Rails successfully makes you a programmer.
I agree 100% it is the people. In the blind rush to try out the next big thing, too many are diving headlong into a new language and framework they may or may not understand. Messes inevitably ensue.
There’s another species of the same variety: lemmings.