From: Nicholas Wieland Date: 2008-12-30T23:12:04+09:00 Subject: Re: Why Ruby? Il giorno 30/dic/08, alle ore 12:35, Robert Dober ha scritto: >> It is indeed the ignorance that rules today. This ignorance however >> is > nothing a single person has to be ashamed of. It is imposed by > ridiculously short decision times, extreme budget pressure and an > overall stressful environment. > I am not capable of quoting any studies on this and would welcome any > pointers. It is however quite obvious (my favourite prove method ;), > that the pressure which exists in our professional lives discourages > reflexion, deep understanding of what we are doing and innovative > decisions. It is my believe that the winning business model will be > one that breaks this vicious circle. I disagree, I know a bit of how "pointy haired bosses" think (they tried to turn me into something like that several times, unfortunately for them there's a small Zed Shaw in me and they can't destroy my "your shit sucks and now you die" attitude :p) and I think the biggest problem is availability and cost of resources. At the end they are something very close to end-users, they care about the final result, and of course they're not enough educated to make decisions that actually make sense on the tech side. What they see is that they can choose between a bunch of developers with medium/high salaries and a million of developers with medium/low salaries. What they normally think is: let's take 20 junior developers and hire a senior that acts_as_babysitter. That's the reason under the outsourcing madness too, developers are exchangeable. I think that the problem here is not companies or management, but pretty much developers. If the only reason you choose a technology is the market: a) In my opinion your skills are poor. In general, if "joy" isn't part of your choice you're a poor developer b) They put themselves in the position of being exchangeable, they all have the same skillset, the same mindset, the same level of disinterest about their job. Corporations especially are particularly good in this, they behave with every project as it already failed, that's why they always try to keep development costs as low as possible. The reason is simple, they often fail. > My personal experience is that when I am talking to a decision taker > about Ruby and she asks me why, my first sentence is already > completely misunderstood - I am well aware of my responsibility in > this kind of misunderstanding. But I never get a chance to discuss > matters during say an hour. The cherry on top of the cream was one > internal encounter with the decision maker, where I suggested to stop > developpement in Java and start with Ruby using JRuby for an easy > transition. This was considered to much risk taking and too much time > consuming (sic). After presenting my case (1800s) the aforementioned > response was made in less than 300s. Immediately after that they > stalled the project for two months (yes that is 5184000s, you got that > right) in which they discussed a migration from Java to C#(1). I have > not stayed along to experience the outcome of this.... one has only > one stomach you know :( Yes, we all have this kind of stories :) Mine is from my pre-Ruby days, where I used to be a Python developer. One of the biggest banks in Italy hired me to develop an internal project in Python, they gave me 3 months (without asking me a damn). After less than 2 month I was over, wrote the test suite (I remember doing a no-no after the other, testing libraries, frameworks, just because I was bored). The project, after 3 years, is still in production. They switched to PHP of course, they weren't able to find enough Python developers, they didn't think at me whining because I was bored, finishing my project a lot before, releasing it with an uptime of years and without a single problem in all this time. They wanted numbers. This is idiotic I know. At least, after a few days of doing nothing, I rewrote the whole project in RubyOnRails (and finished it !!!), and actually felt in love :) > -- > Il computer non è una macchina intelligente che aiuta le persone > stupide, anzi, è una macchina stupida che funziona solo nelle mani > delle persone intelligenti. > Computers are not smart to help stupid people, rather they are stupid > and will work only if taken care of by smart people. > > Umberto Eco I see that Abulafia is well known outside Italy as well :) I love "Il pendolo di Focault" as well, one of my favourites. ngw -- http://www.nofeed.org