A little rant about Rails

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Ok, so I downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2012 two days ago and OMG using it is euphoric. When it dawned on me yesterday that my days pretending[1] to be a .NET programmer will soon be over and I’ll be back to my CFWheels/Railo development and Rails experimentation and lackluster IDEs, I decided to put Google to use: “develop ruby rails visual studio”.

First result was a Stack Overflow thread started by a developer who shared my exact concerns, only that he posted his question in 2009 which means Visual Studio 2008 was the wonder IDE he was jerking off to. One of the comments to his question was a link to a coddinghorror.com article with the accompanying line: “Just remember that they hate you”. Who hates me? I wondered. I clicked through to read (as I would click any link I find anywhere on the internet that contains codinghorror in it anyway – yes, I love Jeff Atwood).

Apparently, David Heinemeier Hansson (creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder? at 37signals) was at it again. This time, trashing any developer who still uses Windows as his platform of choice. Jeff took him down nicely, and effectively came to the conclusion that David is a douchebag. Interesting (albeit, written in 2008) read: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/02/douchebaggery.html

From the article, I followed a link to another blog post written a year before, also describing David’s character. Another interesting read: http://wekeroad.com/2007/10/10/imploding-rails-jesus-dhh-and-the-uncle-ben-principle/

Apparently, Twitter literally dumped Rails for scalability issues. However, I know of a couple of high traffic websites whose technology stack contains Rails in one way or the other. Notable examples include GitHub, Stripe, Get Satisfaction, Braintree Payments, etc. While this will not dissuade me from my journey into (or should I say onto) Rails, I now know to be wary of performance bottlenecks that may arise if the project has to scale efficiently. Oh, and that it’s creator isn’t willing to help should I run into any trouble.

Did you know that David once had a presentation where one of his slides contained just the words “Fuck” and “You”? I didn’t. Apparently, we are more alike than “we” know. Oh wait, I use Windows.


[1] I write C#.NET pretty well. However, I hate ASP.NET and all that it stands for. I believe it spells a death knell to staying abreast of modern web technologies for anyone who dabbles into it. Why? it’s just too easy to get carried away by dragging and dropping stuff that you forget the language the end user’s browser understands – HTML. Sadly, at the moment, I have been tasked with extending an existing ASP.NET application over at the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

 
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