This article is a superb example of bad writing, of bad thinking. I have no skin in the Ruby/Rails game. I'm not a web developer. But I'm interested in the fates of languages and the merits of major approaches that define many jobs and decide the employability of millions, so I read it. The problem is: what in the world is he saying? What is his thesis, and what reason does he give us for believing his thesis? His op…
Did you read the article he was commenting on? If so, his article makes lots of sense.
Don't blame your lack of understanding on the author.
Ruby was the number 1 reason why about 6 years ago, fresh out of uni with a Java/C background, I chose to learn Python and Django. Ruby seemed rather useless outside of Rails and I really, really liked what I saw in the Zen of Python. Ie. less magic, explicit > implicit. Etc.
Ruby is used in many other projects outside of Rails and some don't have anything to do with web development (Chef, Puppet, Homebrew, Vagrant, Metasploit, Logstash, Capistrano).
He's writing in his second (third?) language. How's your second language? Akita is a pretty smart dude. He makes a number of good points, and maybe doesn't tie them perfectly together, but it's a blog post he wrote in a day, not for Harpers. A few points from his rant: 1. If you don't drink the kool aid, you'll be frustrated if you want something else 2. market forces: you have to follow rails, but if rails changes o…
The point @putzdown is making is not that the OP has many typos, etc., but rather that the article is incoherent babble with no structure, no point, and no evidence to support its non-point. If Akita had written: Sometimes, tools and frameworks, like Wordpress and Rails, respectively, gain enough traction that their monopoly economies of scale keep them afloat long after their value sunsets. That would have sufficed.
Precisely. It would have sufficed, and it would have been an unremarkable reaffirmation of the sad reality that yes, widespread habits trump merit in many cases (Betamax vs VHS etc etc). It's not clear what he said, but if all he said was, "Sure Rails stinks but the majority uses it so suck it up," I don't think it'd be an article worth applauding.