On 9/1/06, Dido Sevilla <dido.sevilla / gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html
>
> Actually, despite the fact that I love Ruby a lot, I'm inclined to
> partially agree with him on this.

He is a good writer, and I really like how he cuts through the
rhetoric and is firmly grounded on practical programming matters.

His core point on technology choice is valid:
"How do you decide between C#, Java, PHP, and Python? The only real
difference is which one you know better. If you have a serious Java
guru on your team who has build several large systems successfully
with Java, you're going to be a hell of a lot more successful with
Java than with C#, not because Java is a better language (it's not,
but the differences are too minor to matter) but because he knows it
better. Etc."

His point is valid too if you have a big Rails guru on your team, someone who
has built large successful Rails systems, then you pick a Rails solution.

The performance/scalability of Rails as an enterprise web-fronted system is
continually questioned. People point to Basecamp etc. as examples that Rails can
do it.

But thats missing the point - those systems are successful becuase those
companies have very good, experienced Rails engineers. Rails n00bs would
probably make a lot of mistakes that clash with the framework and
compromise its scalability.

He also has a point about his wait-and-see attitude wrt Rails. Rails development
is moving quickly, and in a year's time the major issues like unicode support,
deployment, support ecosystem (tools, etc.) and performance could be
solved problems.