Critique of DHH philosophy: "37signals' products tend to be so "opinionated" as to be anti-user"
storytotell.org
storytotell.org
Am I the only one who actually laughs when a guy puts up a slide with a dictionary definition of the word "arrogant", admits that the definition fits his personality, and then (a few slides later) responds to other programmers' criticisms of his framework with a two-word slide: "f__k you"? Is the concept of "setup" followed by "punch line" really so obscure? Is the word "f__k" really so disturbing to your delicate insides?
Am I the only one who is amused by these lines from Linus Torvalds' git talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8):
"If you actually like using CVS, you shouldn't be here... you should be in some mental institution, somewhere else."
"Git is so much better than everything else... because my brain did not rot from years and years of thinking CVS did something sane. Not everyone agreed with me... they were ugly and stupid."
"I decided I could write something better than any [source code management system] out there in two weeks... and I was right."
... despite the fact that Linus is (technically) insulting me and every programmer I've ever known?
And am I the only one in the world who saw the title of DHH's critique of the mobile web app ("You're not on a f__king plane!") and laughed out loud, because it was an obvious reference to Samuel "L" Jackson's famous line from "Snakes on a Plane"?
(I guess the reference would have been clearer if DHH had written "You're not reading this Motherf___ing Post on a Motherf___ing Plane", but somehow I doubt that such a title would have appeased the "f-bomb" crowd. Quite the contrary.)
I'd love to read more critiques of DHH (and Torvalds, and PG for that matter) that actually engage his ideas, and fewer tone-deaf, catty complaints about his attitude, his vocabulary, and the fact that not all of his apps are legendary success stories. If his work is so "anti-user", would you please give me some examples of similar apps that do a better job, and explain why you think so? If the web app which works offline is such an amazingly good idea, would you please tell me which ones you use, or perhaps build one and then sell it to me?
The other problem is that David's ideas are not really "his ideas". He simply recycled XP and Agile concepts from the 90s. I for one prefer to read the originals (Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, Ron Jeffries, etc...)
But anyway, a Railsite told me the other day that what he loves about Rails is that it's not especially new, conceptually. It's a series of mdthodologies that work great.
Yes, Rails is the instantiation of a bunch of XP and Agile concepts. But here's the thing: concepts don't serve Web pages. Code serves Web pages. And even Martin Fowler doesn't take the time to write all his own code from scratch.
I don't respect DHH because his ideas are original. I respect him because he can convince thousands of programmers around the world to work together. That is not an easy trick - there's a reason why it has been compared to herding cats.
When you make a change to your commercial web application it is more then just simply programming in some new functionality and making it live. You can do that in your free app or if you have a small user base, change away.
The bigger the userbase the more training you have to do, you have to justify your additions because they will confuse people who will see the new feature and won't want it and actually don't want to pay for the feature (even though there monthly fee never goes up).
End users minds are complex, you might think that programming everything under the sun and making it live would be a huge plus for consumers but it just isn't so.
And not everything I want is a feature. The system is bug-ridden and doesn't work. I mean, how is it possible that you enter information into a form, and the resulting error message doesn't even show. So I email support, and the result is "Oh, well, you need this information." Apparently, if you know just the first name of a contact and don't happen to have the last name, you have to enter something in.
1. Would be nice to actually know that without having to email support. 2. Why not? Seems completely retarded to require something that is unimportant to the grand scheme of things.
So yeah, adding in these simple features would go a long way.
As for some of the bigger features, again, it makes the application difficult to use. Seriously, if those products are the foundation, the poster children of good quality online programming, shit, I'm light years ahead of them.
They were for a while, but they seem to have gotten lazy about new features now that they are rolling around in piles of money. Good luck catching up with a pay product.
They should have error messages I agree with you, I was just thinking along the lines of new features and I assumed that there existing products at least do what they are supposed to do. I have something similar that I work on (officezilla.com).