Aw, come on, nothing I said was critical. It’s a very good thing to be conservative in places. If you’re sitting down to write a new program, how many things ou

Aw, come on, nothing I said was critical. It’s a very good thing to be conservative in places. If you’re sitting down to write a new program, how many things ought to be innovative? Where should you be breaking new ground? You can’t pick up a new programming language, roll your own new framework, learn a new programming paradigm, use it to start a new company and go into a new market, all at the same time. You pick and choose your battles, you pick and choose where you’re going to trade a little risk for reward. For the things Rails does well, there’s very little attraction in replacing it with something that is not-Rails if you already use Rails. Ergo, something not-Rails has to either do somethingRails doesn’t do well or appeal to people who don’t already know Rails. Rails isn’t standing still but neither is Java web development. My ex-colleagues are constantly boasting of the great new things going on in my old ‘hood. But even so, the great new things are centered around the old things it already did well. Same with Rails, it does a particular thing well and “not standing still” doesn’t mean it will magically turn into node.js one day. If we were talking about startups, nothing I am saying would arouse the slightest controversy, it’s the old “crossing the chasm,” “disruptive innovation,” or “innovator’s dilemma” mechanics, only for a free tool instead of a business or service.