From: James Britt Date: 2005-03-22T12:20:48+09:00 Subject: Re: Support for 10x Productivity Increase with Rails! Eric Anderson wrote: > I was going to continue to be my usual lurker self but I just couldn't > resist responding to this. First I want to say I am a fan of Rails and > Ruby in general. I am currently developing a decent size project in > Rails and have contributed several patches to the Rails framework itself > so I am by no means a visiting troll. > ... Thanks for delurking. You've made important points. > > I don't want this post to feel like flame-bait. I am not trying to rag > on any person or project. I just feel that saying Rails has a 10X > productivity increase will be generally inaccurate and misleading. > > Not only that I feel it reflects badly on the technology being talked > about. I had been using Rails prior to your Rails article. I think your > article was a great introduction to Rails, but if I had read your > article and not known about Rails I would have been turned off to Rails > because of that statement. I would have figured that if someone thought > a web-development framework could generally give a order of magnitude > productivity increase then they must not have learned lessons of past > software developers (such as Brooks) and this would probably had made me > put Rails towards the bottom of my "to look into" list. After all how > good can the framework be if they hadn't learned from history? > > Luckily I already knew Rails so I did not let that statement distract me > and I just enjoyed the rest of a good article. There's a fine line between promotion and hype, and the Rails hype may be counterproductive. I can understand why people get enthusiastic, why they want everyone to drink the Rails Kool-Aid; it's great for business and all, and it's arguably good for Ruby, but at times it just comes off as strident dogma, marketecture buzz, or dust-jacket blurbs. James -- http://www.ruby-doc.org http://www.rubyxml.com http://catapult.rubyforge.com http://orbjson.rubyforge.com http://ooo4r.rubyforge.com http://www.jamesbritt.com