"the corporation wouldn't be firing the person in the first place if there wasn't a good reason to get rid of them."
Not necessarily. Say, the CEO tells the VP to disband the department, the group you are in gets closed down, everyone gets laid off "for strategic reasons". The real reason is to demote the department head and eliminate loyal people who could support him.
This can happen to anyone. Believe me, I know what I am talking about: it happened to me and ruined my career.
It has a very poor design for long-term maintenance and growth of applications.
Exactly. Officially RoR uses the MVC paradigm. But it turns out that the views talk to the controller through a global hash ("params"). Most script kiddies who are enthusiastic about RoR are too young to remember the COMMON blocks in FORTRAN-77. But that's the "design pattern" RoR is really based on. Ridiculous.
As far as "object-oriented" script languages go, Ruby is particularly abominable. If you want to be OO, you should support encapsulation as a minimum. Ruby does not. The word does not even occur in the glossary at the end of the Pickaxe book. And if that were not enough, you may even assign new values to a Ruby constant. You get a warning though. Come on....
I know that nowadays it is incredibly unpopular to build solid, reliable apps. Everybody must be "agile" and crank out crap very fast. Ada programmers, for instance, who must write code that never fails (because if their programs crash, the plane you may be sitting in will crash too) are regarded as living fossils by the rapid prototyping maniacs. In other words, the culture of writing solid, bug-free, maintainable software is missing. That's probably one of the reasons why so many apps actually look (and "function") like prototypes.
Finally: the real problem is the concept of the web application itself. It is incredibly tempting to have a universally accessible thin client. Web frameworks abuse the stateless HTML protocol one way or another to achieve this... but remember, HTML was designed to transmit documents & hyperlinks, not to become a client GUI. I think it is high time we threw out all this crap and design a really new stateful protocol for client-server apps over the Internet.
Well, I have been using SGI workstations between 1993 and 2004, and I do not miss them. The Indy era was nice, but then the decline began. I had to share my office with an Octane2, it was terrible:-
1) The machine dissipated 750 W, and the MIPS chips did not have a powersaving mode -- something that even a Cyrix 686 could do, or the cheapo Athlon XP I had in my home PC.
2) The Octane therefore needed cooling fans like a jet engine -- with the same noise level. It was intolerable.
3) This pretty expensive box came without a CD-ROM, and without USB ports. OK, there was a SCSI slot in the back, but that's it.
4) The h/w was unstable, we had 5 machines, 4 of them developed serious h/w problems within a year -- graphics cards died, the backplane died...
SGI just lagged behind in many respects. And because of this I am not sorry seeing them go.No, please don't beef up the MIPS-based h/w. Let it die peacefully.
"the corporation wouldn't be firing the person in the first place if there wasn't a good reason to get rid of them."
Not necessarily. Say, the CEO tells the VP to disband the department, the group you are in gets closed down, everyone gets laid off "for strategic reasons". The real reason is to demote the department head and eliminate loyal people who could support him.
This can happen to anyone. Believe me, I know what I am talking about: it happened to me and ruined my career.
It has a very poor design for long-term maintenance and growth of applications.
Exactly. Officially RoR uses the MVC paradigm. But it turns out that the views talk to the controller through a global hash ("params"). Most script kiddies who are enthusiastic about RoR are too young to remember the COMMON blocks in FORTRAN-77. But that's the "design pattern" RoR is really based on. Ridiculous.
As far as "object-oriented" script languages go, Ruby is particularly abominable. If you want to be OO, you should support encapsulation as a minimum. Ruby does not. The word does not even occur in the glossary at the end of the Pickaxe book. And if that were not enough, you may even assign new values to a Ruby constant. You get a warning though. Come on....
I know that nowadays it is incredibly unpopular to build solid, reliable apps. Everybody must be "agile" and crank out crap very fast. Ada programmers, for instance, who must write code that never fails (because if their programs crash, the plane you may be sitting in will crash too) are regarded as living fossils by the rapid prototyping maniacs. In other words, the culture of writing solid, bug-free, maintainable software is missing. That's probably one of the reasons why so many apps actually look (and "function") like prototypes.
Finally: the real problem is the concept of the web application itself. It is incredibly tempting to have a universally accessible thin client. Web frameworks abuse the stateless HTML protocol one way or another to achieve this... but remember, HTML was designed to transmit documents & hyperlinks, not to become a client GUI. I think it is high time we threw out all this crap and design a really new stateful protocol for client-server apps over the Internet.
Well, I have been using SGI workstations between 1993 and 2004, and I do not miss them. The Indy era was nice, but then the decline began. I had to share my office with an Octane2, it was terrible:-
1) The machine dissipated 750 W, and the MIPS chips did not have a powersaving mode -- something that even a Cyrix 686 could do, or the cheapo Athlon XP I had in my home PC.
2) The Octane therefore needed cooling fans like a jet engine -- with the same noise level. It was intolerable.
3) This pretty expensive box came without a CD-ROM, and without USB ports. OK, there was a SCSI slot in the back, but that's it.
4) The h/w was unstable, we had 5 machines, 4 of them developed serious h/w problems within a year -- graphics cards died, the backplane died...
SGI just lagged behind in many respects. And because of this I am not sorry seeing them go.No, please don't beef up the MIPS-based h/w. Let it die peacefully.