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Zed Shaw, creator of the popular Mongrel HTTP daemon / library, has decided it was high time to tear into the Ruby/Rails community for many different complaints that he has been collecting over the last few years. "Rails is a Ghetto" is Shaw's self-proclaimed exit strategy from the Rails community. "This is that rant. It is part of my grand exit strategy from the Ruby and Rails community. I don't want to be a 'Ruby guy' anymore, and will probably start getting into more Python, Factor, and Lua in the coming months. I've got about three or four more projects in the works that will use all of those and not much Ruby planned. This rant is full of stories about companies and people who've either pissed in my cheerios somehow or screwed over friends. I can back all of them up from emails, IRC chat logs, or with witnesses. Nothing in here is a lie unless it's really obviously a lie through exaggeration, and there's a lot of my opinion as well."
I've been saying RoR sucks for years. Where's my story?
Only a fucking tool bag piece of shit would:
* spend 10-20 minutes calling me names over IRC,
* not have the balls to say any of that to my face,
* say I'm a dick for wanting to use a different (established) publish/review model,
* and then demolish such an important file for a project,
* keeping everyone stumped and pissed for an hour,
* therefore proving me right.
This is exactly what makes Rails a ghetto. A bunch of half-trained former PHP morons who never bother to sit down and really learn the computer science they were too good to study in college. BTW, this is true about Kevin as he's an English major or something stupid (and it shows).
Hats off to you Kevin, you fucking prick. I'm enjoying my vacation too. Ok, this is the summation of his first point. He got into a verbal argument with someone on his team about how patches should be handled. Kevin thought people should be able to submit patches to his workspace while Zed vehemently did not.
People commonly have disagreements, work them out.
The fact that this (largely nontechnical) issue is his first point disheartens me and makes me wary of ever working with Zed no matter how brilliant he is. Perhaps this is another example of how non-personal communication (forums/IRC/IMs/e-mail) leads to heated debates over absolutely nothing. I would start to point out that Zed did call Kevin a 'mofo' first before Kevin called him a 'dick' but I would hesitate as name calling and the like is for children.
It's a wonder Zed gets anything done other than by himself to me.
As for his complaints about companies, I have to warn him that bad companies are everywhere
I hate to say this but after reading this first part of the rant, I think Zed is just as big (if not half) of the problem of the community being in shambles as any of his targets are.
My work here is dung.
He sounds like a real people person. I can't imagine why companies aren't jumping at the chance to hire this guy.
But for the absolute opposite reason: any community that would have this guy as a prominent member and/or mouthpiece is immature indeed.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Why did this even make the front page? It had no redeeming value except to prove that "Zed" is a pain to work with and unprofessional.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
I actually started to read TFA, but discovered that it appears to just be a bunch of high school drama. Or something.
Holy cow! I started reading TFA with the idea that there would be some good points in there, but never got to them. What a load of verbal abuse! Excuse me, but I don't fancy reading through that.
I understand that things have really hurt this guy and made him angry, but I don't think this is the way to go about improving things. It may be a good way for him to vent his frustration, but I would say that if you want people to take you seriously, it's better to write down your criticism in a civil manner, with examples of what you are criticizing and, for even better results, suggestions for how to improve things.
A long rant that slings abuse at everything and everyone is bound to just hurt people, and that's rarely if ever a Good Thing. As for me, I won't be reading the article any further, so that's _one_ initially interested reader he has lost. And I'm sure I'm not alone.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Apparently so are some of its former developers.
Clever title, but "Pissy Foul-Mouthed Drama Queen Makes Histrionic Exit from Rails" would have been more accurate. I don't much care for rails either, but I do hope any other project he hops onto doesn't look to him for their public face.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
I just read about 3/4 of his rant and 90% of it is his bitching about not having his ego stroked at every opportunity.
.com boom but I deserved to" sour grapes.
I hope this guy is a millionaire, because he certainly talks with the arrogance of one and I doubt he'll have much community respect after this (assuming anyone knows who he is). Sounds like "I didn't make my fortune during the
That guy must have a HUGE ego...and looking at his douchey picture on his blog, he thinks he's major hot shit.
Guess what buddy? You should be the new poster boy of
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Some details here: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10456534
Sure there is proof. Facebook's main function is to get something on everybody. You are posting your life on Facebook and all your friends.
Actually there seems to be some very tenuous connections as far as venture capital for Facebook and the CIA. I think it is more Tinfoil hat stuff than real but I could be wrong.
Social networking sites could be of interest to law enforcement agencies. If someone has committed a crime or is on the run they will often turn to friends or friends of friends for help. If the police are looking for anyone the first thing they will do is contact the person friends, family, and co-workers. Social networking sites soft of put them all out there for the world to see. The scary thing is that they tend to be some pretty distant links on your friends links.
On guy that I added as a friend I had one class in eleventh grade with. I haven't seen him since but he found me so I added him.
So I just kind of doubt that the CIA is really backing Facebook but I don't doubt that they have an interest in it.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Obligatory pot/kettle/black reference.
O....K.... I think that stands by itself.
But wait! There's more...
No, I believe you're doing that...right now...
And, based on the "beat your fucking ass" statements above, he'll be utilizing that software as a client at some point.
Seriously, based on reading only a portion of his post, I wouldn't hire this man even if he was a coding god. I don't think his woes are due to his previous co-workers. Textbook example of a serious attitude problem.
Perhaps Google read a few paragraphs of Zed's So Fucking Awesome and thought better of asking him to do anything at all. I feel sorry for this guy now because this one post will do more to ruin his career than any minor tantrum in front of a few people (a few of which he describes here). I hear dreamhost is hiring though; his weblog reminds me of theirs.
Not trolling, just asking people to stop putting this kind of junk up front. It's a waste of everyone's time.
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
That is truly one bitter individual.
I mean, there's such a thing as burning bridges, but he's taken it to the next level. I know for a fact that if I ever received a resume from such an individual, it would go straight into the trash.
As far as I'm concerned, interpersonal skills count for a lot - even if your a genius, in a real environment you'll have to function as part of a team. This guy, well, it seems that he has real difficulties in a team environment. Sure, he may have worked with some individuals that were not up to his standards (would anyone be?), but to say what he said...it's too much.
Good riddance to him.
The manager who dresses him down saying he can't code, then comes back later and claims he meant someone else. Since he's obviously too busy being angry he completely missed that the manager backtracked to try and protect himself from any lawsuits.
I have been using Ruby since before Rails existed, and the whole Rails "community" has been highly suspicious to me from the start. Between outrageous claims and a far too religion-like mindset I just kept my distance waiting for the hype to go away again. It seemed to much like a marketing before technology movement (akin to say, the Java it derided so much (for good reason)).
You can see the difference between the old Ruby community and the Rails evangelists in many threads on the main Ruby mailing list throughout the last few years. Some of us already warned that in the end Rails may be a bad thing for Ruby back when the marketing blitz started, and now it seems this might hold true after all.
It's not a fate a very nice, expressive language made by an incredibly modest guy deserves. I hope more Ruby aficionados distance themselves clearly from the Rails hype.
``With dozens of programming languages emerging every year, how can people still get riled up about any of them? I'm not even saying that people shouldn't argue which is better, but the fervor behind it strikes me as odd, given that there are so many essentially identical options to choose from.''
I think:
1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.
2. Many people get excited about things they _think_ are new and cool, even if these things aren't.
3. Some programming languages actually are worth getting excited about.
4. Compared to mainstream languages, many alternative languages have a lot to offer.
``Which language you're going to use is often just a matter of installed base and what someone else started a project with. How can anyone be emotional about that anymore?''
Just because your hands are tied doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to argue about what the best choice had been if you had had the freedom to choose. In fact, it probably makes such debate more important, because you could win by losing your shackles and choosing a better language anyway, or by doing the _next_ project in a better language.
If anything, I think both industry and academics are holding back progress by being too conservative in their choices of languages, all too often going with what happens to be pushed by commercial vendors and/or used by other people at the moment. For example, the duplication of effort that has gone into making things work in Java that already worked in other programming languages is positively staggering. And as far as I am concerned it has been a huge waste of time and effort, because Java wasn't when this started - and to some extent still isn't - a great language. Don't get me wrong; I think the switch to Java was a leap forward for the industry; I just wish people would have jumped to a better language.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
My favorite part is where he brags about having a business degree, except that prior to that he admitted to being homeless for a big chunk of the year.
This is a classic case of a loser blaming everyone else for his problems. If this idiot didn't know that the world is populated by shitty little startups with no money and big ol' mean corporations that don't pay invoices for 6 weeks then he definitely got into the wrong business.
Blaming a coding environment for your financial woes is like blaming your car because the subway runs late.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
After skimming past a few paragraphs and seeing the level of his discourse, I had no confidence in his credibility and stopped reading.
I like Mongrel -- I use it to run my Instiki web site -- and think Shaw's an undeniably good programmer. But there's a certain kind of personality in a (fortunately small) subset of tech-heads, that assumes that the sheer brilliance they bring to their work is all that matters. You'd better listen to them because they're fucking brilliant and you're not them and don't you fucking forget it. I have more than one acquaintance who exhibits this attitude -- and who has a whole lot of trouble finding and keeping work. Hmm.
Oddly, I'm exploring Python and Django now after my own long detour through Rails, without quite accomplishing anything on my own part other than cementing an exasperation with PHP (version 4 in particular). Running that Instiki instance is part of what's lessened the appeal of Rails. I don't know how much of that can be blamed on Instiki itself, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "not all of it." But I digress.
As he ponders his rent, he might realize that Junior Sysadmin at Google pays more than massuse or spooge-mopper. They get to write cool code on the side too, so he could do some more fun things with criminal records or fingerprints if he wanted to. Who knows, he might have impressed the boss with his skilz and moved up the ladder. If not, Google could have rented the coliseum in Rome for a grudge match to the death.
When a good company offers you a job with good money, the answer is "when can I start?"
Interestingly, the Rails community had started to 'normalize' on a framework of Apache + Mongrel in the last year or so. Some of this may have had to do with comments by the author of this article and Mongrel that lighttpd sucked (apparently because the lighttpd developers were not keeping modproxy up to date enough for him, which may or not be true - remember that Mongrel only works well to the extent that the web server proxy implementation works well as well).
Prior to this, lighttpd and fastcgi had been favored. With that guy's attitude, I suspect that Mongrel is quickly going to fall out of favor. Hell, with that outburst, I think people should be rightly concerned about using and updating Mongrel as a matter of due diligence.
The major point here is that alternatives exist and we of the lighttpd and fastcgi persuasion would like more fellows to build brain share. We promise not to swear at you quite as much.
In testimony before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment,"Use of the Internet by Terrorists: Using the Web as a Weapon", November 6, 2007, there was this surprising testimony:
Jane Harman: "What can we do to go on the offensive? Are we doing enough to create false websites? And then try to track people, extemists, who try to go on those sites? Are we doing any of that? Create problems for them, if they go on these sites, they may not be authentic, and turn the internet into a less reliable source of information. Is there anything we're doing there?"
Ms Katz, attorney, Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk: "There are easy ways to manipulate popular websites and [myspace] profiles, and our govt agencies are doing that, moving certain videos up in the [google video and youtube] rankings, and lowering the ranking. We're also seeing a lot of sites that are deisgned to make fun of these sites, and bringing humor to it. We're seeing an awful lot of arabic humor designed to discredit Some of this. Some of it I suspect is being done through governmental agencies, some of it is done through talented teens who think its funny. A lot of this information is tracked and is being held by the social networks, youtube, mysapce, facebook, all of them collect the IP address of every comment and everything posted, and retain it for at least 3 months, to turn over to law enforcement. We can let our young people know they are being manipulated, and do more of that."
As for pro bodyguards: if they're there to protect you, and not just to show off how important you are, then they carry Uzis.
Pudge, you work here. You just claimed that you could hurt someone, on your company's web site.
Well, of course you could hurt him. Anyone could. Anyone could hurt anyone else. All it takes is a l;ack of caring, some motivation, some ether, and a car battery. No one sane brags about it. And no one with hopes of furthering their career says anything so juvenile on their own company website.
Now, what he said was that he would pay for the ring, and fight you legally. Knowing the two of you, I would put my money on him. No question. I would absolutely love to see the two of you face off in a ring. Whoever loses, the rest of us win.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'm beginning to get an inkling of why you don't tend to see such an elitist "I'm better than you!" approach to communication on Windows-based forums, mailing lists and IRC channels - and I think Zed has just inadvertantly explained it beautifully.
In closed source software, very few have access to source code and those that do aren't at liberty to discuss it in any detail. We only have access to the same help files, knowledge bases and forums, which are by and large a lot more human readable than several thousand lines of C code. But at the same time, they're a lot less informative. In solving a particular problem, everyone's trying to find the proverbial black cat in a coal cellar. It's in everyone's interest to remain at least civil at all times, because next week it could be us asking the questions.
In Open Source, everyone has access to and can discuss the source code all they like - and there is an elite of people who have the time and expertise to be able to understand it in some detail. The elite don't need to worry so much about pissing people off because they have the ability to read the source code and understand what is going on. And so it seems much more often you find someone who tends to come across as either very outspoken (at best) or downright malicious (at worst).
2/1/2007
Today, Theo de Raadt declared that henceforth he would "be nice to people", because "not even the mightiest asshole gods on Mount Asshole can top the the egomaniacal rantings of this Rails douchebag who no-one has ever heard of".
By comparing the significance of their work versus there public tactfulness, Linus Torvalds has now been awarded the Nobel Prize for niceness, and the American Marriage Council has awarded Hans Reiser 'Husband Of The Year'.
${YEAR+1} is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!
I mean, if you're a real tough guy you'll just burn the fucker's house down while he sleeps inside of it. When he flees the building, then you go to town with a 8lb baby sledge while his children watch.
(If you're gonna call 'pussy', you really should come with something more hardcore)
Blar.
Except for the foul language, of course.
Assuming this isn't a parody, this guy has some really major issues that he needs to work on. I don't care how good someone thinks they are, with this kind of attitude and me being a hiring manager, his resume goes into the circular file.
...because he graduated with honours from the Theo de Raadt School of Diplomacy.
Some predictions for 2008:
* Zed will fork and re-factor the framework, quietly releasing the far technically superior and more stable "OpenRails".
* Google will use OpenRails to successfully deploy the Beta release of its Next Big Thing. It handles thousands of requests per nanosecond and Google's share price spikes, though it doesn't account for any of Google's revenue.
* The PHP community declares "OpenRails is dead!"
92.6% of all statistics are made up on the spot. (Yes, I had to.)
Fair point, but to a large extent Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Ada Augusta all worked alone; and they did ok in terms of ideas and lack of jerkness.
Although I bet Zed would kick their collective asses, using his nunchucks and rudimentary understanding of the HTTP spec.
His pointing out that Rails required restarting every 4 minutes was both technical and interesting - shocking, in fact.
It's Zed's. Who's Zed? Zed's dead. Well, career-wise at least ;-)
Albert Einstein actually managed to scuttle his initial post-graduate career because he let everybody know how smart he was. (He actually was as smart as he thought he was, but that didn't make anybody like him any better.) That's why he had to go work as a patent clerk. His best work was done after he'd grown up and gotten more sociable — and collaborative.
Perhaps the Turing machine and Alan's other mathematical achievements occurred in splendid isolation. But what about his work with Enigma? That was a huge project, and I doubt if it got done by him sitting around doing everything himself.
Ada Augusta, as I recall, never delivered any working systems. Wasn't her fault (the technology just wasn't ready for her), but that excludes her as any kind of teamwork benchmark.
I think it's better if I don't comment on the rant itself. I think I can offer a little bit of general background information, though.
It's important to note that there is a distinction between the "classic" Ruby community (led by Matz), and the Rails community (led by DHH). Since Rails is built atop Ruby, Rails jobs are also Ruby jobs, but the two communities still have very different cultures.
Mongrel is a Ruby web application container mostly written in Ruby, except for the HTTP parser is written in C/Ragel. It has very good performance, and the Ragel state machine definition was derived directly from the BNF in the HTTP specification, so it also has extremely strict standards compliance. It became the most popular web application container for Rails. Since most of Mongrel is written in Ruby and most of the rest is in Ragel, we eventually got a JRuby/Java version of it too. These days Glassfish is becoming an increasingly popular substitute for Mongrel on JRuby, however.
fastthread is a Ruby library which "hot-fixes" the Ruby standard library to provide optimized versions of its thread synchronization primitives. It was mainly intended to improve performance, but as a side-effect it also worked around some long-standing bugs in the core Ruby classes which resulted in memory leaks and interpreter crashes under high load. Mongrel ended up requiring fastthread as a dependency because it was the only way to stably run a high-throughput application using the synchronization primitives on the 1.8 interpreter. fastthread is unnecessary on other Ruby implementations like Ruby 1.9 and JRuby.
DNA just wants to be free...
Turing disliked working with others and most likely had what we'd call today Asperger's syndrome (we do like to label these things). The book 'The Man Who Knew Too Much' is an interesting read (or more directly: http://www.ijpm.org/content/pdf/175/Turing.pdf)
..although when he didn't have to look at people, he did achieve great things as part of the Enigma team.
Poor Zed looks like he's in the running for plain ol' Bipolar Disorder sans Genius though...
You don't understand why this is threatening? If I "casually" mentioned that I know where you live and that I used to be a firefighter and know how to get away with arson and that I think you're somebody whose family deserves to suffer, you wouldn't think that was threatening?
(Note: I am entirely non-violent, have never been a firefighter, do not know where you live, and have no idea how to commit arson)
I understand what you're saying - you said you could hurt him, not that you would. I understood that when I read your post without reading your clumsy explanations.
What I am saying is that communication between human beings is not precise like code. You did not say that you would hurt him, but the implication was clear. Obviously, I don't think you have any intention of hurting him. It just makes you look like a typically clueless robot-like nerd, that's all. Try that kind of crap in the real world and you get beaten up and/or slapped with restraining orders and/or worse.
What a poor image you project for your employer!
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
This story is already flamebait enough as it is to add fuel to the fire in responding to ACs and trolls.
A metadiscussion of the story and the community is warranted and slashdot staffer's feelings about the subject are certainly interesting but this all seems childish...
If you're not doing it for the "lulz" then you should just stop.
If you are doing it for the "lulz" you need to work on your counter-trolling techniques. We expect a more seasoned ZING from the ones with the slashdot icon next to their names.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
While I think Rails has some problems, it's important to draw a distinction between bugs in the Ruby standard library/interpreter and bugs in Rails. If it was just a Rails issue the hotfix for Ruby 1.8 (fastthread) wouldn't have resolved things. Note that other Ruby implementations (e.g. 1.9, JRuby) don't manifest the same issue and a fastthread equivalent is not required.
DNA just wants to be free...
A lot of Python users want to thing its big, but it just isn't. If it had 10% of the marketshare I'd be shocked- in my 7 years of professional programming, I've seen 2 Python programs.
Perhaps your experience is somewhat limited. Python is in heavy use and/or development at Google, Microsoft, YouTube (now part of Google but they made the choice independently), the Washington Post, NASA, etc.
Is that enough to make it "big"? Well you didn't define "big" so it's hard to say. I think that measured in lines of code, Perl is much bigger than Python. As is COBOL. And FORTRAN. So what? Accumulated lines of code is not a very interesting metric.
Tai chi does have a few techniques for fighting with sticks or knives, though I get the impression they're mainly there to give younger guys something to keep them interested so they can learn the less flashy parts. The real risk in fighting against an older tai-chi practitioner is that if you can't always tell whether he's a newbie or has been doing this stuff for 20 years, and can take all that slow controlled stuff and do it really fast. I suspect that if a bar brawl were to start happening around my teacher, either it would get distracted by a couple of confusing remarks, or the participants would find that some of them were sitting on the floor unharmed while the others were throwing punches that kept missing their targets.
My college theater professor's boyfriend taught aikido as well as fencing, and he gave us a day's lesson as part of our classes. It was kind of fun to throw a punch at him, and find myself on the floor without him having used much of any force. It doesn't take too much work to learn how to deflect attacks from unskilled fighters so you've got time to get out of their way; doing so without anybody else getting hurt requires more skill. Tai chi has some of that as well; it's especially useful for the kind of fights where you don't want to hurt the other person, like when your kids are mad and feel like thrashing at you.
Chuck Norris says his actual way of dealing with fights is to not get into them, and walk away if he has to. Just because you _can_ beat the other guy up doesn't mean you have to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What I was trying to say is that, when you're an established company, with an existing codebase and talent that knows how to develop software using language X, language Y has to be a big win before it's worth moving. It doesn't matter whether you should have used Y rather than X in the first place. It doesn't even matter that Y is better. Y has to be a lot better.
I'm wondering what kind of person hangs his dirty laundry in a public place, and a good chunk of it revolves around his inability to find work.
.. programming for somebody at a company? What a thankless twit .. the best revenge is to live well, not to program for 21 years before dropping a missive that sounds like it was written by a 21 year old to be dropped on XBoxLive voice chat at 3am.
You know what I think makes a good coder? Somebody who can work with the way things are, not they way they think they should be.
I don't doubt there are some massive tools in the Ruby community, but there are some massive tools in life. What kind of person wastes so much of their energy and life fighting elements that they clearly can't change? It's a waste of a brain, and to wit, maybe not as brilliant a brain as it imagines itself to be.
What kind of thankless nitwit turns down a junior job at Google and bemoans giving cut rate deals to nobodies under the condition that the money is payed ASAP?
Eat some humble pie, kiddo, and get a hobby that doesn't involve trying to be awesome. Maybe, like
Cripes, I can hear folks tremble at the thought of him becoming more active in some of the other communities.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Seven years of professional programming? What did you do? COBOL coding for a bank?
http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm/
As for C# -- dont be so arrogant. Microsoft does a lot of stuff wrong. But Sharepoint is a killer app - although a buttugly one. And while hubris reigns about the failures of Microsoft elsewhere, they are establishing a monopoly there thats even stronger and meaner that Windows and Office ever were.
And clients aren't always realistic about what work they need done, or what it'll cost them. The old "$5 to turn the knob, $995 to know which knob to turn and how far" kind of story has pretty much always been true. Back when I was in the billable-hours game, it took a while to get used to the idea that my work might be worth $500K/year to a client (more if they only needed a day's work, negotiably a lot less for extended jobs), but the first time you tell somebody "Don't do X, that would be a Really Bad Idea, do Y instead", you've potentially saved them millions, and you don't feel at all bad charging them $250 an hour to do the grunt work on Y that their own employees could do for $50 if they knew how. (It was also interesting to have law firms as customers, since their attitude toward money was that computer consultants usually bill less per hour than associate lawyers, so go do what you need to do and don't waste our time supervising you. By contrast, retail companies are universally very price-sensitive about everything.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Chuck Norris came along and bent the ruby rails into loops!
#!/usr/bin/huckabee
use CHUCK_NORRIS;
That's as far as I've gotten with my new language.
I've decided it will be statically typed. With Huckabee types, you know where everything stands.
I don't want to be a 'Ruby guy' anymore
I'm sorry, but I feel the same thing with every new programming language and/or paradigm. It's just a bunch of busy work to learn a new syntax, find all the best-of-breed libraries, and work around the unforeseen limitations. In the end, you're not more than a negligible amount better than before, and you've wasted a year of your life.
Are there still people out there who believe in the silver bullet? I mean, I understand there are always new people coming into the practice, but I believe we can mature as a group. Nobody advocates GOTO any more, maybe we can stop advocating the endless language churn? It seems like an enormous waste of time.
I mean, follow your bliss, if you've got great ideas, implement them. I've written redundant libraries because I wanted to see how it would be done. Explore, enjoy. But understand that since LISP we've been able to do whatever we wanted to do, so it's all just hand waving at this point.
More power to Ruby. Rails. Python. Whatever. I'm still hacking Perl at the moment and I don't see any compelling reason to switch. I can do what I need to do. I'm sure that your language of choice cuts the mustard too. When the next 10 Super Languages Of The Future (tm) come out in the next decade, I'll enjoy reading about them and watching as they run into their own particular issues because...
Effective Software Design Is Hard.
Cheers.
Make sure you include some runtime checking, because you never know what might get loaded and linked.
He fucked up on the funny part. Like pretty much everyone who declares themselves to be funny.
(Here's how you tell - you're the only one laughing)
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Personally, I find it slightly creepy to change the behaviour of a class this way. Duck typing looks cool, but it kinda breaks down if you expect a duck and get an atomic bomb instead. Your particular problem could easily have been solved with method overloading (given a less ducky language), which I personally would prefer if only for the peace of mind.