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Right, but you're targeting the wrong problem still. DHH is (and I use this term unironically) a visionary. And on top of that he had a keen enough political

Right, but you're targeting the wrong problem still. DHH is (and I use this term unironically) a visionary. And on top of that he had a keen enough political sense (and arrogance) to be able to deflect or mute criticism of Rails's early flaws. Ruby is a slow, memory hog? Doesn't matter, developer time is worth more than machine time. Buy bigger machines. Rails concurrency model sucks? Doesn't matter, fire up more processes! These were real problems, which have been subsequently addressed in Rails (by and large, by other people in the community who cared about those subjects). But what was important about what DHH did was define a vision and aesthetic for what web development should look like (and please note i'm no DHH fanboy. I jumped ship during the Merb/Datamapper split), and kept on pushing on his priorities even in the face of legitimate criticisms of things he thought were less important. So, Rails succeeded because DHH has sensible enough taste in terms of prioritizing concerns, and a strong enough user base to fix Rails's shortcomings. I'm not as familiar with the specific battles over Gnome (partially because i'm on OSX, and also because i find the interlocutors in the Gnome discussion to be so furiously inarticulate), but the conflict really only comes down to two possibilities. Either the leaders of Gnome genuinely are shit designers and aren't meeting the needs of their community, or they're really terrible at politics. That's a really important distinction to be mindful of. I'm not amongst their target userbase, so frankly I can't say one way or the other, but all of the complaints I've heard against Gnome's leadership are things that I as a user have never ever cared about (granted I haven't used Gnome in a while, but all the times i've used systems w/ Gnome installed by default in the past, i've been satisfied). And really, if Gnome's leadership is so inadequate, i'm puzzled why a critical mass hasn't risen up and forked the community. That's really the ultimate vote of dissatisfaction.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
I'm not convinced that Ruby on Rail's popularity has to do with the factors you describe. I think it comes down to two other factors: community and hype. Technologically, it wasn't anything special, and still isn't. Many of us who'd been doing web development for years at that time had either used or created similar or better frameworks in languages like Perl, Tcl, Python and even Java. These frameworks were usually kept internal to the organization that developed them, however, so they were obviously nowhere near as widely used. DHH was of minimal importance, too. Yes, he was somewhat of a visible figure head and spokesman for the project, but that was about it. For the average Ruby on Rails user, DHH didn't have much of an impact. In my opinion, Ruby on Rails brought together several distinct groups of young men (women are still very rare in the Ruby on Rails community) who'd typically been outcasts within the computing industry. They included: 1) Less-talented UI, web and graphic designers. These people, unable to find work in more traditional software development, print media, and other fields, ended up moving toward web development, where the bar to entry was set much lower. 2) Less-talented software developers. These people, either due to age, a lack of experience, a lack of education, or a lack of natural ability, were inherently drawn to Rails. It provided the rigid structure ("convention over configuration") that they needed in order to get anything done. It also allowed them to continue to avoid learning SQL and proper database design techniques, while creating something that partially worked (even if the result lacked severely in terms of performance and reliability). 3) Attention-seeking youth. We all know who these people are. They're the ones who repeatedly wrote loud, profanity-ridden "articles" full of anger. Or they created absurd, cryptic writings and art, and then spontaneously vanished, creating much unnecessary drama. Many of them were also self-styled "hipsters", who just went out of their way to be different merely for the sake of being different. Ruby on Rails provided something these people could all rally around. It gave them a common cause, if you will. And they rallied around this cause quite loudly, which generated an immense amount of hype relative to what they were able to accomplish, or what their software provided. This helped draw in more and more of these outcasts, making the community larger and larger. I think that GNOME 3, for instance, is a result of spillover from this newly-formed community into existing, established open source communities. Members of a community formed solely around a lack of merit forced their way en masse into what was once a near-total meritocracy, and as would be expected, disaster was the result.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago

I'm not convinced that Ruby on Rail's popularity has to do with the factors you describe. I think it comes down to two other factors: community and hype. Technologically, it wasn't anything special, and still isn't. Many of us who'd been doing web development for years at that time had either used or created similar or better frameworks in languages like Perl, Tcl, Python and even Java. These frameworks were usually kept internal to the organization that developed them, however, so they were obviously nowhere near as widely used. DHH was of minimal importance, too. Yes, he was somewhat of a visible figure head and spokesman for the project, but that was about it. For the average Ruby on Rails user, DHH didn't have much of an impact. In my opinion, Ruby on Rails brought together several distinct groups of young men (women are still very rare in the Ruby on Rails community) who'd typically been outcasts within the computing industry. They included: 1) Less-talented UI, web and graphic designers. These people, unable to find work in more traditional software development, print media, and other fields, ended up moving toward web development, where the bar to entry was set much lower. 2) Less-talented software developers. These people, either due to age, a lack of experience, a lack of education, or a lack of natural ability, were inherently drawn to Rails. It provided the rigid structure ("convention over configuration") that they needed in order to get anything done. It also allowed them to continue to avoid learning SQL and proper database design techniques, while creating something that partially worked (even if the result lacked severely in terms of performance and reliability). 3) Attention-seeking youth. We all know who these people are. They're the ones who repeatedly wrote loud, profanity-ridden "articles" full of anger. Or they created absurd, cryptic writings and art, and then spontaneously vanished, creating much unnecessary drama. Many of them were also self-styled "hipsters", who just went out of their way to be different merely for the sake of being different. Ruby on Rails provided something these people could all rally around. It gave them a common cause, if you will. And they rallied around this cause quite loudly, which generated an immense amount of hype relative to what they were able to accomplish, or what their software provided. This helped draw in more and more of these outcasts, making the community larger and larger. I think that GNOME 3, for instance, is a result of spillover from this newly-formed community into existing, established open source communities. Members of a community formed solely around a lack of merit forced their way en masse into what was once a near-total meritocracy, and as would be expected, disaster was the result.