Comments on: Foot in mouth

By: Rich

Rich — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 15:16:22 +0000

Rediculous as in ‘ridiculous’? Perrogative as in ‘prerogative’?

Isn’t pointing out the errors of others fun? And isn’t having your errors pointed out … not fun?

By: Justin Perkins

Justin Perkins — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 02:04:12 +0000

By the way, if I hurt anyone?s feelings. Well, just get over it.

Love the attitude Dustin.

Instead of starting by fixing the mistakes in some foreign framework and refactoring all the things that don?t apply to your environment spend your time building a lean and reusable pattern that fits your requirements directly. In the end I think you will find that your homegrown small framework has saved you time and aggravation

1) Spending time refactoring in Rails, that's almost an oxymoron. 2) Rails is exactly that, a small homegrown framework.

We're all entitled to our own different opinions, but there's a big difference between voicing your opinion with ignorance and disdain vs. respectfully and knowledgeably stating your thoughts on the matter (from your own experience, not what people tell you). One is offensive and the other is respected and encouraged.

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 22:14:21 +0000

By the way, if I hurt anyone's feelings. Well, just get over it. Here is a quote from Rasmus (and why I sport PHP)

Many frameworks may look very appealing at first glance because they seem to reduce web application development to a couple of trivial steps leading to some code generation and often automatic schema detection, but these same shortcuts are likely to be your bottlenecks as well since they achieve this simplicity by sacrifizing flexibility and performance. Nothing is going to build your application for you, no matter what it promises. You are going to have to build it yourself. Instead of starting by fixing the mistakes in some foreign framework and refactoring all the things that don't apply to your environment spend your time building a lean and reusable pattern that fits your requirements directly. In the end I think you will find that your homegrown small framework has saved you time and aggravation and you end up with a better product.

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 21:45:12 +0000

I’ll try not to make you spit your coke up next time ;)

By: Kyle

Kyle — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 19:04:38 +0000

Jonathan: It wasn’t so much the remark, but how it was said. It was said as though the folks over at Measure Map were idiots for picking Rails. Also, yes, as Justin has said this isn’t just a one time occurance. Dustin has been bashing rails left and right for several months now.

Matt: Well, yes. Scaling and scaling cheaply are two entirely different things. In the long run, for large applications, hardware is dirt cheap compared to developer time. By the same means, J2EE and .NET are “difficult” to scale when compared to PHP :)

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 19:04:27 +0000

Assuming that Rails scales effortlessly is just as dangerous and misleading of saying it doesn’t scale. It is important to note that David has always maintained that Rails may require more hardware to get the same results, but brushes this off because the gains in programmer productivity far outweigh the costs of additional hardware, whose price is falling all the time. Also if something is slower to run, it can often be offset by caching with something like memcached. For Robot Coop, if you can afford DB servers with 12gb of RAM, then hardware is obviously not a problem. :)

I still recommend people strongly consider PHP — it’s not terribly trendy right now but it’s an undeniably powerful platform to scale cheaply on.

By: Justin Perkins

Justin Perkins — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:25:44 +0000

Jonathan,
Though I don’t think it was expressed in this post, we’re not talking about one off the cuff remark. This has been an ongoing thing for many months.

Anytime the subject of Rails or Ruby comes up, Dustin’s snarky meter goes off the charts.

I agree 100% with Kyle that it is insulting to the RoR (and Ruby) community. Does Dustin know something we don’t know or does he just think he does?

By: Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 13:56:27 +0000

Calling an offhand remark insulting to the hundreds (if not thousands) of RoR developers seems extremist. (I picture you pulling off a white glove and slapping him across the face.) Saying RoR can’t scale is certainly inaccurate and I won’t defend him on his point of view.

By: Ben Eastaugh

Ben Eastaugh — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 21:56:04 +0000

9rulers are good to pick on, for two reasons. One, it shows you apply your standards universally. Two, they tend to be able to take it on the chin… Bryan’s a case in point. ;)

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 13:36:26 +0000

“I don?t think it scales real well, even though I haven?t really touched much of it?”

If he havent really touched it - was is his argument then? I just love people talking about stuff they dont know shit about…