6 ms·

I didn't read "Rails can't scale" at all. Did you even finish it? He recommended still using Rails at the end.

jimboyoungblood 18y ago
If this wasn't a RoR hatchet job, why put it in the title and sprinkle sarcastic jabs all over the article? Regarding his recommendation at the end, if someone suggested a server with 32GB of memory to run a site that has "About one user every 10 minutes", I would think "damn, this doesn't scale" :)
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  It was in the title because many of the snooty programmers who think they're so much smarter than the .NET guys, and who go off and build overly-complicated things that don't work just for the sake of building something complicated, are in love with Ruby on Rails. It doesn't attack RoR so much as a subset of the RoR community. It pretty much abstains from the topic of RoR as a language and framework.
  - donniefitz2 18y ago
    I think you're spot on. And I'm a .Net developer (a bumbling fool no doubt). But really, you grasp the point best so far.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
chaostheory 18y ago
well it would be bad advice for the programmer to simply throw away all of his work at that moment and start from scratch - regardless of what you think of the technology he used "Rails can't scale" was implied
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  I don't think it was implied at all, especially since he recommended using it at the end. It's implied only if you read the title and nothing more. What was both implied and directly stated was that a cloud-based architecture is often not the best idea for a lot of people, despite the modern mania for it.
  - Periodic 18y ago
    I think he only reason it's still in there at the end is just so the site doesn't have to be rewritten. He's just changing the hardware to something beefier instead of optimizing it. It's sad that rails, by default though it may not be the case anymore, makes n+c requests to the database when you load a page that lists n objects. It can be fixed in one line of code per page.
  - plinkplonk 18y ago
    Phil specifically addresses the idea that he is dissing RoR in a comment.(emphasis mine) "Angry Rails Enthusiasts Whose Comments I Deleted: A lot of the comments were of the form “Your assertion that it is impossible to build a responsive Web site with Ruby on Rails is wrong. Rails is in fact great if programmed by a great mind like my own.” The problem with this kind of comment is that I never asserted that Ruby on Rails could not be used effectively by some programmers. The point of the story was to show that the MIT-trained programmer with 20 years experience and an enthusiasm for the latest and greatest ended up building something that underperformed something put together by people without official CS training who apparently invested zero time in exploring optimal tools. Could some team of Rails experts have done a better job with mitgenius.com? Obviously they could have! But in the 2+ years that our MIT graduate worked on this site, he apparently did not converge on an acceptable solution. My enthusiasm for this story has nothing to do with bashing Ruby or Rails. I like this story because (1) it shows the fallacy of credentialism; a undergrad degree in CS is proof of nothing except that someone sat in a chair for four years (see http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-undergraduate-computer-science-education/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-unde... for my thoughts on how we could change the situation), (2) it shows what happens when a programmer thinks that he is so smart he doesn’t need to draft design documents and have them reviewed by others before proceeding (presumably another set of eyes would have noticed the mismatch between data set size and RAM), (3) it shows that fancy new tools cannot substitute for skimping on 200-year-old engineering practices and 40-year-old database programming practices, and (4) it shows the continued unwillingness of experienced procedural language programmers to learn SQL and a modicum of RDBMS design and administration, despite the fact that the RDBMS has been at the heart of many of society’s most important IT systems for at least two decades." That is exactly what I understood from the article. I don't see any rails bashing in the original article and you would have to cherry pick phrases to get that idea. I read the HN comments first and thought phil had gone off on a rant against RoR t judge from some comments here. that will teach me to read HN comments before reading the original article!

If this wasn't a RoR hatchet job, why put it in the title and sprinkle sarcastic jabs all over the article? Regarding his recommendation at the end, if someone suggested a server with 32GB of memory to run a site that has "About one user every 10 minutes", I would think "damn, this doesn't scale" :)

mattmaroon 18y ago
It was in the title because many of the snooty programmers who think they're so much smarter than the .NET guys, and who go off and build overly-complicated things that don't work just for the sake of building something complicated, are in love with Ruby on Rails. It doesn't attack RoR so much as a subset of the RoR community. It pretty much abstains from the topic of RoR as a language and framework.
- donniefitz2 18y ago
  I think you're spot on. And I'm a .Net developer (a bumbling fool no doubt). But really, you grasp the point best so far.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

chaostheory 18y ago

well it would be bad advice for the programmer to simply throw away all of his work at that moment and start from scratch - regardless of what you think of the technology he used "Rails can't scale" was implied

mattmaroon 18y ago
I don't think it was implied at all, especially since he recommended using it at the end. It's implied only if you read the title and nothing more. What was both implied and directly stated was that a cloud-based architecture is often not the best idea for a lot of people, despite the modern mania for it.
- Periodic 18y ago
  I think he only reason it's still in there at the end is just so the site doesn't have to be rewritten. He's just changing the hardware to something beefier instead of optimizing it. It's sad that rails, by default though it may not be the case anymore, makes n+c requests to the database when you load a page that lists n objects. It can be fixed in one line of code per page.
- plinkplonk 18y ago
  Phil specifically addresses the idea that he is dissing RoR in a comment.(emphasis mine) "Angry Rails Enthusiasts Whose Comments I Deleted: A lot of the comments were of the form “Your assertion that it is impossible to build a responsive Web site with Ruby on Rails is wrong. Rails is in fact great if programmed by a great mind like my own.” The problem with this kind of comment is that I never asserted that Ruby on Rails could not be used effectively by some programmers. The point of the story was to show that the MIT-trained programmer with 20 years experience and an enthusiasm for the latest and greatest ended up building something that underperformed something put together by people without official CS training who apparently invested zero time in exploring optimal tools. Could some team of Rails experts have done a better job with mitgenius.com? Obviously they could have! But in the 2+ years that our MIT graduate worked on this site, he apparently did not converge on an acceptable solution. My enthusiasm for this story has nothing to do with bashing Ruby or Rails. I like this story because (1) it shows the fallacy of credentialism; a undergrad degree in CS is proof of nothing except that someone sat in a chair for four years (see http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-undergraduate-computer-science-education/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-unde... for my thoughts on how we could change the situation), (2) it shows what happens when a programmer thinks that he is so smart he doesn’t need to draft design documents and have them reviewed by others before proceeding (presumably another set of eyes would have noticed the mismatch between data set size and RAM), (3) it shows that fancy new tools cannot substitute for skimping on 200-year-old engineering practices and 40-year-old database programming practices, and (4) it shows the continued unwillingness of experienced procedural language programmers to learn SQL and a modicum of RDBMS design and administration, despite the fact that the RDBMS has been at the heart of many of society’s most important IT systems for at least two decades." That is exactly what I understood from the article. I don't see any rails bashing in the original article and you would have to cherry pick phrases to get that idea. I read the HN comments first and thought phil had gone off on a rant against RoR t judge from some comments here. that will teach me to read HN comments before reading the original article!