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Joel (Wrong) On Ruby

Sep 01, 2006 9:22 AM
Tags: coldfusion, programming, rails, ruby, web2.0

update Matz has an interesting point about using someone else's software in the first place, which I don't quite agree with.

The not-exactly-objective DHH has a nice takedown of Joel Spolsky's weird anti-Ruby essay.

One noteworthy point he missed:

Joel writes, "Ruby [is] 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." But the current MySpace is written in ColdFusion, the laughingstock of server-side development. And they're pretty damn successful.


Comments: Joel (Wrong) On Ruby

Well, MySpace does do quite terribly at its current load. That leads me to believe they were just out-buying friendster in beefy servers, rather than designing something that actually scales well -- either way, it's not particularly relevant to the platform they chose.

Posted by: Bob Ippolito on September 1, 2006 2:45 PM | permalink

Oh yeah, there is a lot to be learned from the fact that MySpace is one of the worst sites out there (UI, HTML, JS, CSS, security, architecture, you name it).

I think the main lesson is that the right idea plus the right timing, pretty much trumps everything else.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on September 1, 2006 3:57 PM | permalink

Yep. Right idea + right timing = more than enough money to buy servers. On the other hand, for Joel's target market, performance with minimal resources does matter.

I wonder if Joel just got annoyed with people asking him why he wasn't using RoR, so had a bit of a spit?

Posted by: Alan Green on September 3, 2006 11:42 PM | permalink

I dunno ... considering he's probably been asked for a decade "why VB(Script)?", it's weird.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on September 4, 2006 2:07 PM | permalink

Can you expand the thought a bit....the one you don't quite agree with.

I agree with both Matz and Joel in this case.

Posted by: Bubba on September 5, 2006 1:56 PM | permalink

I think Joel's piece is neo-phobic, for lack of a better term. Best-of-breed scalability and performance are irrelevant for 99% of web applications out there. I think it's far more important to choose tools that are easy to use and easy to maintain, and Rails seems to be stellar in those respects.

My limited experience is this: personnel choices matter far, far more than language choices. I would take a great Java coder over a bad PHP one, and vice-versa.

Posted by: Joe Grossberg on September 5, 2006 2:57 PM | permalink

No more comments! Either someone has violated Godwin's Law, I'm tired of the discussion or, most likely, the ten-week window has closed. You can, however, contact me through email.