Derek Sivers, probably unintentionally, struck a sentimental nerve in the Rails community.
The odd, and immature reactions piled up quickly. PHP people hailing for their savior, and misty-eyed Rails followers, fiercely debunking the “myth” of Mr. Sivers. The chaos overshadowed a serious concern: An obscure suicide note, published by none less than David Heinemeier Hans, the originator of Rails.
Rails’ hype was over in July 2007. Of course that didn’t, and should not be a reason to abandon such a curious project. We’ve learned, over the course of years, that rewriting is bad. That it’s a thing you shouldn’t do. It’s interesting that nobody complained a couple of years earlier, when they really should have; but then again, one man’s poison, is another man’s meat.
The Rails community backlash against Derek sounds like it came fresh from the ’80s, where a lonely teenager is tricking his phone to carry a name-calling response to some absurd BBS group over a noisy line. Haven’t we learned that calling others stupid backfires? We are seven years well into the 21st century, I thought lousy telephony was dead.
Derek’s post was awfully misinterpreted. It feels like he’s been cast out a sacred cult called Railsotology, and condemned to glance back in regret at the puffy pillows of social praise. There’s a strange divide between the friendliness of the Ruby community, and Rails. The latter was able to stand on Ruby’s shoulders, but never learned why Ruby really took off. I realize that blind arrogance would suggest Rails pulled Ruby into the light, but I big to differ.
The language of bias is exactly what made Rails interesting. “Opinionated”, they said, and we liked it. I liked it, and I’m the most opinionated person I know.
Bias sold Rails. It was the very essence of its marketing efforts. Denouncing bias is bias in itself. So is condoning a rewrite, and condemning another.
Comment (1)
What sold Rails, is the only chance that programmers received for looking cool vs. geeks, I remember how coding was beautified by Rails and every hacker then became socially accepted :D
No, for real, from the day one I’ve been really shocked by how fast it spread out and every PHP hacker I knew went there. But everyone’s coming back, one really weird growing factor with Rails is the ability to find out that hardcore coding/optimized and realistically modulated is of real simplicity, not a mere methodology. Oh’ c’mon Rails made coding as philosophical beleives and religions.
I’ve been really turned off by it lately thinking about how it is widening its reach, good thing is, one can only find ways of doing things, and Rails might be an alternative and not the only solution to look “cool”.