Thoughts on Zed’s Rant | January 4th, 2008
I resisted the urge to comment on this but so many opinions are floating around and most of them are fucking stupid so I had to comment.
Zed’s rant means nothing to the technology of Ruby or Rails. His rant was about people he had taken issue with. Thats it. I’m reading absolutely retarded ’sky is falling’ responses about failure of the technology. There was no failure of technology. This rant was the product of failed communication. I don’t agree with the opinions or the approach but I sure found it funny. Zed is an excellent flame writer and should probably awarded a medal for best troll ever written in the history of the internets.
I’m reading posts all over the place that are using Zed’s rant as a rally against the technology of Ruby and that is bullshit. Zed predicted that technology will change. Here, read that again: Zed predicted that technology will change.. No shit it will. Of course better solutions are going to emerge and evolve. It doesn’t mean the technology isn’t valid today.
I agree with Tim Bray and Dion Almaer. Rails is a solid technology appropriate for some scenarios but not all. Use it or don’t. Thats it. Calm down. Take a breath. Read the rant for the humor it is intended to be.
Lastly, if you are a programmer, take this rant as opportunity to teach yourself some Python or Scala or Erlang or even Ruby. Then you can draw your own, intelligent, rational and possibly objective arguments for or against a technology.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
There was so much more in Zed’s post. The same people he rants against are the ones crying the sky is falling
I found the part on consulting VERY interesting, and there are many other aspects of his rant that are excellent reading.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Well, the posts I’m reading on DZone are what prompted my sky is falling comment. Developers creating FUD about Ruby. I take exception to this behavior because they are not based on accurate assessments.
The people Zed calls out have (rightly) ignored him (that I’ve seen) and not said anything. Maybe I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure I subscribe to most of those peoples feeds..
Agreed that the writing on consulting was interesting. I’ve seen to be true as well but, like the fact that technology changes, this isn’t real news. At Nitobi we’ve bailed a few Rails ventures ourselves. Big deal. This is not a Ruby/Rails thing. Many firms have created gobs of shitty code for years and many other firms make money cleaning that mess up. Happens all the time.
For sure it was a good read, much of Zed’s writing is like this, and I expect this isn’t the last we’ll hear form him. If anything it was a brilliant way to get a shit tonne of traffic, eh.