> I think the real point of the article is that almost all > of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We > spend endless time debating Ruby vs P

> I think the real point of the article is that almost all > of the technologies at our disposal are good enough. We > spend endless time debating Ruby vs Python, RoR vs Django > and navel gazing about Lisp or Haskell or Smalltalk, but > how often do we talk about users? Frankly, I do not see any shortage of talk about "users" or "delivering" or any other of hundreds of similar terms. I think this line of reasoning overlooks some pretty crucial factors: - Arguing about X vs. Y beyond a certain point often has nothing to do with "productivity" or some other undefinable metric. It is entertainment. Not ha-ha entertainment, but something to pass the time - trading quips, debating and so on. - New paradigms, languages, frameworks and applications - as well as hardware and architecture - certainly affect users. Some directly, some by providing developers the ability to concentrate on the essence rather than the unnecessary boilerplate obstacles. It often seems that the people writing the "stop language wars" posts and the like are the ones most emotionally invested in the topic. > To use your architecture analogy, few architects worry > about whether or not a house will stay up, because they > have mature processes and frameworks in place to > guarantee the soundness of the design. Yeah, and those processes did not just spring up from nothing. There have been centuries, millennia, of development - and you can be sure there were more than a few "pyramid vs. cube" and "vaulted vs. flat" debates in there.