“[Ruby developers] are children drawing on the walls with crayons” : August’s Troll Of The Month
Continuing the Troll Of The Month feature, I came across this gold today: "Who are these mongrel Ruby developers?" by Peter Thomas, a Java developer. It was posted in late July, but as I've only just found it, and it came after July's TOTM, it counts.
Of course, this award could be taken to be proving his entire point, which I think is reasonably valid. The troll award therefore, doesn't go to Peter and his well explained argument, but to the first commenter on his post, 'Mikael', who has this to say:
These are children drawing on the walls with crayons with some crayon salesmen egging them on. They won’t understand why it isn’t a good idea to draw on the wall until they grow up a bit and understand the context of why people live in houses, what it takes to get a house and so on.
Ouch!
August 8, 2006 at 6:07 pm
When will people realize that in any type of engineering, you choose the proper tool for the job! Ruby is good at what it does. So is Java. There are many cases where they are both appropriate. Personally, given a choice, I'd choose Ruby because the beauty of its dynamic programming features make me excited about programming and help me write better code, but that doesn't mean I would choose a wrench to do a hammer's job.
August 8, 2006 at 6:10 pm
I agree wholeheartedly. That's why this blog runs on WordPress rather than some Ruby equivalent. It's the best tool for the job :) To be honest, I'd rather install PHP apps on my servers over Rails apps any day, but I'd rather code in Rails and eat nails than have to code in PHP. :) Sadly a great language to write in isn't a great language to deploy, and vice versa.
August 8, 2006 at 6:21 pm
>> Sadly a great language to write in isn't a great language to deploy, and vice versa.
Some day, we won't even dream of having this problem. But unfortunately that day is not today.