Typical
In Language Wars, normally rational Joel Spolsky has simply cracked. I don’t know if it’s the pressure of popularity, or what, but he’s simply lost it. Other people have taken him down a notch, but here’s the priceless bit of nonsense:
I for one am scared of Ruby because (1) it displays a stunning antipathy towards Unicode and (2) it’s known to be slow, so if you become The Next MySpace, you’ll be buying 5 times as many boxes as the .NET guy down the hall.
Seriously, this is so amazingly silly that I don’t know where to start. First, if you’re “the next MySpace”, you can afford this problem. But that’s not really the true absurdity demonstrated here. You are not going to become that popular1, so don’t sweat it. You can sweat it if you get that level of success.
Also, you have to be able to move fast enough to get to the position of popularity, unless you truly have a one-of-a-kind idea, for that sort of success. Seriously, this argument is built on the mental masturbation of “what if I was Google?” But you aren’t, so just stop.
Quit sweating the problems that give you a mental stiffy, and work on the problem that are truly hard: ease-of-use, process, transparency, discoverability and the whole use experience.
1 This isn’t absolutely true, but given hundreds of thousands of startups, and the tiny handful of big successes, it’s probabilistically true.
This entry was posted at 8:09 am on 2 September 2006 and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
[...] Joel followed up with another article, as did David, and several other bloggers joined in. [...]
[...] Typical [...]
Oh, well put! “Your garage band’s guestbook is NOT going to have eBay’s scale problem.” Should be tattooed on the eyelids of aspiring web application developers.
Funny—I thought the biggest mistake he made was spending 75% of that essay talking about how everyone needs to use enterprisey stuff like .NET and J2EE instead of agile “unproven” stuff like Rails, then proceeded to spend about 10% of the essay talking about how his own software development process is based on the use of an in-house ad-hoc previously unknown agile unproven buggy language called Wasabi.
While I agree with Joel that it’s probably best for most people to avoid Ruby/Rails at this time (Oct 2006), I don’t agree with that particular reasoning. Simple fact is, RoR doesn’t buy you much but definitely comes with uncertainty.
I disagree with the statement that there’s not much to gain from RoR, but only in the case of greenfield application development. When integrating with complex existing systems, it may or may not bring any advantages, other than being less annoying. :)
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I’ve known many a great problem, most of which did not happen.