Mike-O-Matic

It started innocently enough. Joel Spolsky posted a well-reasoned article on his blog last Friday in which he recounted how he would advise a friend who was looking to choose a platform for a new website development project. The basic advice came down to this:

1. People all over the world are constantly building web applications using .NET, using Java, and using PHP all the time. None of them are failing because of the choice of technology.
2. All of these environments are large and complex and you really need at least one architect with serious experience developing for the one you choose, because otherwise you’ll do things wrong and wind up with messy code that needs to be restructured.

Unfortunately, Joel inserted a paragraph in the middle of his otherwise uncontroversial essay that pointed out how Ruby on Rails is deficient.

Before you flame me, Ruby is a beautiful language and I’m sure you can have a lot of fun developing apps it in, and in fact if you want to do something non-mission-critical, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun, but for Serious Business Stuff you really must recognize that there just isn’t a lot of experience in the world building big mission critical web systems in Ruby on Rails, and I’m really not sure that you won’t hit scaling problems, or problems interfacing with some old legacy thingamabob, or problems finding programmers who can understand the code, or whatnot.

It went on to elaborate on more specific reasons for why Rails wasn’t ready for prime time, such as Unicode support and a known slowness. Joel also ended his article talking about what Fog Creek uses internally, a VB hybrid that he calls Wasabi.

Naturally such an assault couldn’t go unpunished. David Heinemeier Hansson, the could-be Gap model who came up with Ruby on Rails, fired back later in the day. In his post, he accused Joel of spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt about Ruby on Rails.

This is truly golden. Now, now. Some might accuse Joel as being a little late to the FUD party. That most of the guests already went home. But what’s a few years off? It wasn’t too long ago Joel thought VBScript was a reasonable language for web development.

It should be noted that invoking FUD in technical discussions is the equivalent of calling somebody a momma’s boy. The particular phrase has very strong Microsoft connotations, so conceivably anyone who earns it is doing something Microsoft-esque. David went on to blast Wasabi, saying that Joel is being somewhat hypocritical to recommend the “Big 3″ (ASP, Java, and PHP) for everyone else while creating a proprietary, one-off language for his own use.

Joel followed up with another article, as did David, and several other bloggers joined in.

I don’t really want to comment on the technical portions of this debate, because those aren’t the most interesting; it’s not surprising that flamewars get started over obtuse differences in more-or-less interchangable technology. What is interesting are the different forces that are at work in the programming ecosystem.

On one hand we have the need to seem relevant in a churning technical landscape, best exemplified by Joel. He owns a successful company making a well-regarded bug tracking tool, and is renouned as a ISV writer and blogger. He seems to write the introduction for every book about high-tech small businesses. Despite all of this outward success, he thinks that he needs to maintain mindshare as a leading-edge programmer. This leads to commenting on new technologies defensively, as was the case with Ruby on Rails. Having a successful product built on a decidedly non-sexy platform isn’t quite enough in an industry where you are judged by your dependency version numbers.

As correct as his assessments are, any commentary he makes about newish languages will be heard as an attack by cutting-edge developers. Rails does suffer the fate of many recently-popular technologies, such as slow speed and evolving third-party support; with time, good management, and continued interest these things may well get ironed out, much like they did with all of the other platforms.

On the other hand we have the creators of the new technologies, represented by David. These people need to try to hang on to their thought leadership position for as long as possible before the next wave come through, and will respond to any negative feedback as reactionary FUD. Apart from the intellectual accomplishment that comes with being the creator of a popular platform, we should understand that these folks have many financial reasons for protecting their franchise; owning a standard puts you in a position to set up training programs, create certifications, sell books, line up speaking engagements, get free press coverage, etc. In many cases these things add up to a surprising percentage of the revenue generated by the companies involved. Very much a case of selling shovels during a gold rush.

When these two forces come together, we get the current flamewar. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. For corporate development, you would likely be better off sticking with one of the Big 3 languages since they are the most sussed out at the moment. For new products, the rapid development available in Rails may make it worth considering. As Joel said the platform you choose will likely come down to the one you know best, and that is alright since they all do pretty much the same thing.

My personal opinion is that Rails may be undone by the fact that many of the constructs it championed are now being incorporated into the more mainstream languages. In PHP (my primary platform) I have been playing around a little with CakePHP, which, despite some extra things you need to add here and there to account for PHP4’s introspection limitations, is functionally quite similar. I also think that platform isn’t nearly as important as the domain-specific library you have built for your company’s unique problems. In the end you need good programmers who solve problems in consistent, appropriately-generalized ways. This is very subjective, of course, which is why we tend to focus on easily-argued things such as Vector libraries.

Whenever we see such a debate coming through in blogs and forums, it is worth investigating the real reasons why. It very rarely has anything to do with language syntax or capabilities.

Til next time.

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