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I recall a lot of articles like this about J2EE. And then a lot like this about MSFT technologies. There was an essay pg wrote where he said that Microsoft was
by braythwayt 10y ago
I recall a lot of articles like this about J2EE. And then a lot like this about MSFT technologies.
There was an essay pg wrote where he said that Microsoft was Dead (http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html). He didn’t mean dead as in “Dead," he meant dead as in “Nobody is afraid of them any more,” and the generalization of that is that it was no longer relevant.
I think Rails is there. I think Rails is dead. Obviously, not dead as in dead, but dead as in, it is no longer revolutionizing anything. It is no longer making new things possible. People no longer adopt it and discover a productivity dividend they didn’t expect. It no longer swings business decisions (“How can we get this done in three months? What about using Rails? Let’s try it.”)
I think that’s fine. I can quote “A new perspective is worth 80 points of IQ.” I don’t think that’s true of Rails today, but then again, I don’t think that’s what people want from Rails. If people want 80 points of IQ, they’re off looking at Elixir and Phoenix.
Likewise, I can say that “A language that doesn’t change the way you think about programming isn’t worth learning,” but who is learning Ruby and Rails in order to change the way they think about programming? They’re trying to bang out CRUD apps, and they don’t want to think about programming, that’s why they value a stable community with widely adopted “best practices.”
When you have a stable, mature language and framework, you spend more time thinking about your business and less time thinking about programming.
And thus, Rails (and sorry, but Ruby too) is not for people who want 80 points of IQ or to change the way they think about programming. And thus, in the sense of being influential, in the sense of disrupting anything or changing anything Rails is dead.
It has matured. It is mainstream. It is plumbing, it is concrete, it is rebar, it is infrastructure. Necessary and useful. But not something you want to spend a lot of time thinking about, just something you use if it suits your purposes.
- pjc50 10y ago“A new perspective is worth 80 points of IQ.” That's not how IQ works. It's not additive.
- braythwayt 10y agoThe quote is from Dr. Alan Kay. I think he knew that when he said, it, and personally I think IQ is a racist, bullshit metric. But the general idea of the quote is still meaningful, and the thing I am saying when quoting it is that having gone mainstream, adopting Rails is no longer about adopting a new perspective. It’s tautological: You don’t get a new perspective, or an advantage, by adopting the mainstream thing and using it the mainstream way with the mainstream best practices, carefully writing your code to be familiar to the mainstream programmers. That’s not a bad thing, but it is a different thing from when Rails was first popping up in Reddit’s old days and HN’s early days.
- iqisracist 10y agoOh boy Numbers are racist now
- braythwayt 10y agoI really think you can do better to make constructive contributions to discourse on Hacker News. In that spirit, what I'll say is that no, numbers in and of themselves aren't racist, or biased, and neither are words, sentences, facts and so forth. But the way someone uses them can be racist, or biased, whether deliberately or systemically (which is where a system creates racist or biased outcomes, even though no one person is attempting to create a racist or biased outcome). http://braythwayt.com/2016/03/30/racism-is-injustice.html http://braythwayt.com/2016/03/30/racism-is-injustice.html
- theoh 10y agoI think you might be getting downvoted for stating it so baldly. IQ scores reflect the place of a particular person relative to the population rather than a simple score derived from performance. You may mean that IQ doesn't work like decibels, which are intended for the invariant expression of relative loudness. It's a complicated area and I don't think "additive" quite captures the property that you are saying IQ doesn't have...
- mcguire 10y agoWell, IQ isn't really a thing, so...
- angelbob 10y agoI think Ruby may still have a few under-recognized advantages for small teams :-)
- brhays 10y agoThanks for this Reg, I have spent the last year of my life trying to vacuum the drama out of this discussion. The "working retirement" of mature technology is so normal and pretty wonderful in the scheme of things. Even the "prominent defector" bit is easily predictable. Once you know this, you can pick technology for the stability & productivity or the +80 IQ, depending on your situation. https://speakerdeck.com/tehviking/surviving-the-framework-hype-cycle?slide=31 https://speakerdeck.com/tehviking/surviving-the-framework-hy...