Do you think we are stupid? | Hacker News Reader

Do you think we are stupid?

blog.obiefernandez.com

25 pointspius19 comments

Yes, I think you are stupid.

Not because you use rails or ruby, but because you even care about such trivial bullshit. I use PHP everyday, but do you see me crying about the insane amount of whipping it takes on my blog? Well, I don't have a blog because I'm too busy building shit, but you get my drift.

Yes I think you are stupid because you are polarized on the issue to the point that you can't see any validity in an opinion outside your own. You are religious about something where agnoticism gets you paid better and more frequently.

Christian vs Muslim vs Jew == Java vs Ruby vs PHP vs ... I think the smarter people are the ones who can set aside differences and gleam usefulness from all things.

Sorry on a 2 day code bender so I'm a little disjointed in my thought process, but this is pretty close to how I feel about it. Apologies for the cursing.

+1 Hell Yes.

I am so sick of Rails advocates. Take a page out of Theo's book: "Shut up and hack!"

And yet you're not sick of the, probably equal number of, idiots who can't seem to stop shouting inflammatory, misleading, and often -wrong- things about it?

Frankly, I wish both extremes would just kill each other off.

Thank you, well said. Understand re code bender too ;)

This entire argument frustrates me. Let me just go on record as saying this is childish. Hype or fad is never a reason to use or abandon any programming language or framework. Rails is useful, period. It has an extremely broad community of libraries and plugings, and it makes developing applications CHEAP and FAST and, yes, even GOOD. That's why people use it - so they can start startups lightning fast, or compete with the bigger companies who are using heftier languages and frameworks.

Me thinks there's too much self love in the ruby community. Build more great stuff and you'll have done a better job of convincing me then with these weak arguments I keep on reading.

After watching the hype bubble that surrounded java implode, could you really blame us for saying yes?

Rails got hyped, sure, but consider the resources behind Rails, and behind Java. I'd guess there two or even more orders of magnitude difference. To me, that indicates that as much as there was some hype, there was also a lot of substance, because the guys pushing Rails just don't have the money to push it that far with nothing to show for it.

Java is on a very short list of the world's most used programming languages. This strikes me as another case of "people overestimate a new technology's effect over the next five years and underestimate its effect over the next 10 years."

Java did not replace existing desktop software. But it took over most enterprise web server-side development and in the process helped to make most enterprise desktop software development irrelevant.

So, perhaps the initial hype did not play out exactly as expected. But the success of Java does suggest the level of hype was justified, if misdirected.

When I started using Java in 1996 - people looked at me funny and asked why I wasn't using C++. Everyone said Java was a fad and that it wouldn't scale.

It was. And it didn't. Very few applications have been created in Java. Java stuck in the isolated server environment, but everything survives there, since servers are like zoos: easily controlled environment where animals get exactly what they need without losing body parts in the wild. You can build your own toy language and it will work perfectly fine on your server.

Java doesn't scale? Really? A lot of work has been put into java since the beginning to make it fast. Jruby for example is faster than C Ruby. Java might not be adequate for web development (I never liked the initial model and by the time better frameworks came out I had given up) but there are many applications where it really shines.

Jesus... "Java is faster than C" argument again. Inferiority complex aside, I did not mean scaling in a technical way. Java did not scale out as a general purpose programming language - it remained foreign and inadequate on all major platforms and, as a result, no software (in comparison to C family) has been done in it, with a notable exception of zoo-like server environments. Go into Debian packages repository and see for yourself. Or, for Windows users, into your C:\Program Files folder.

I hope nobody will be stupid enough to start listing (one by one, literally) Java software projects, like Eclipse, Lucene, etc.

Not every web application is as simple as a blog...

In what universe has Rails eclipsed PHP? It sure isn't this one.

The moon eclipses the sun, but it's still a lot smaller... :)

Is there a Dark Side of the Rails? And is that in any way similar to the Wrong Side of the Tracks?

I know you were mostly kidding, but it made me think.

Yes -- the Dark Side of rails is the (obvious) realization that it's still just a framework (built on the ruby language), in which just as crappy code can be written as any PHP, Python, Java, C++, etc application.

There is no panacea. No escape 100% from the ability to shoot yourself in the foot. No silver bullet.

Nor has any rails fanboi (to my knowledge) said rails was ever any of that... but Yes, the Obies of the world really should just ignore the flameboys at this point in the RoR lifecycle.

Who cares

Reply on news.ycombinator.com