Controversy

Derek Sivers, quite the Rails champion when he decided to rebuild his CD Baby e-commerce site using Rails two years ago, has now admitted defeat. After two years of wrestling with Rails while building the new site, Sivers along with coder Jeremy Kemper, decided to face up to reality. Kemper went off to 37signals and Sivers rebuilt the entire site in PHP in just two months. As such, Slashdot is jumping on the bandwagon by telling developers to "think again" about using Rails in future.

There was no "Troll of the Month" feature in November, because I couldn't find any. December has started off strong, though, with two articles: Why Django Kicks Ruby on Rails' Collective Ass and Constructive Reasons to use Django Instead of Rails. While the first is definitely the most inflammatory, both make bizarre arguments (amongst some good ones, admittedly) and seem to be nothing but "let's bitch about Rails to make Django look better"-fests.

This month's "Troll of the Month" is Ruby vs Python - why no-one should care by Cynos. Cynos touches on a point I've seen raised a few times in the past month.. namely that Python and Ruby are similar and are, supposedly, 'converging'. He argues, therefore, that both communities should stop evangelizing to each other. Despite a reasonable, if baited, argument, however, the comments quickly turn into a pointless flamewar:

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.

It's time to bring in a regular feature.. Troll Of The Month. Every month or so there appears to be a new article circulating that explains why 'Ruby sucks' or why you shouldn't use Rails to develop serious applications. Most of the time, they're unbalanced and poor explained, even if the author has some valid points.