Rails is a Ghetto

wow... Zed is ticked off... after years helping Ruby on Rails fix their performance and stability problems, he's decided to ditch the entire community as soon as he can. Some choice quotes:

Now, DHH tells me that he’s got 400 restarts a mother f---ing day. That’s 1 restart about ever 4 minutes bitches... If anyone had known Rails was that unstable they would have laughed in his face. Think about it further, this means that the creator of Rails in his flagship products could not keep them running for longer than 4 minutes on average.

woah... the extremely hyped applications Basecamp and Highrise crashed that much??? I find that a little hard to believe, but DHH kind of comfirmed it... although said it was an unfair statistic.

...in chats with me and them where I started to identify the GC, Threads, and IO all I ever got was denial from guys like Dave Thomas, Michael Koziarski, and Chad Fowler. Remember that nasty cgi.rb bug that is fixed with a monkey patch in Mongrel? Did you guys know that Michael K. and Dave Thomas pretty much threatened me into not releasing a Mongrel fix for the problem for three months?

that could have something to do with your hostile demeanor... just a thought...

Great programmers don’t defend stupid, they stamp it out and own up to their mistakes... [unlike] these scrubs who infect my Rails projects with so many patterns I see M.C. Escher paintings in the damn comments.

hehehe...

ThoughtWorks is simply taking advantage of a pattern where new technology goes from fringe to corporate and then dies. A great example of this is Java Portals. They started out on the fringe at universities and non-profits, where they were mildly successful. Then they migrated into the corporate world where they were complete disasters, and finally the risk averse government picked them up for even less success.

huh... Zed's no fan of portals...

He does have some decent constructive criticism in the article, which is unfortunately buried by a hot molton lava flow of spite... He does give snaps to the JRuby crowd, saying that they did it right (thanks in part to him, of course)... and hopefully JRuby/Rails will totally trounce Ruby/Rails.

Overall, its a nice piece of counter-propaganda to the Rails hype. Agile and Rails are tools, just like everything else... and as Alec always says, good tools allow developers to do stupid things. Rails strongly encourages you to be smart, but it will let you be stupid if you really want! The solution today is the same as it always was, and will always be: hire good developers, and let them choose their tools, unless you have a damn good reason why they shouldn't.

(hat tip Rich Manalang)