Of course, this cuts both ways. The Ruby community is infamous for being, for lack of a better word, ADD when it comes to frameworks and tools. What's cool this month is un-cool the next, when someone else comes along and re-invents the wheel with different names & syntax. Going back and trying to reconjure up some old Rails code I wrote a few years ago is basically impossible, as the plates have shifted underneath it so much as to make it a huge project in itself to bring it up to the present day toolchains.

Beyond this, I see communities obsessed with tools and frameworks as distracted. The hard problems are those of algorithms, data structures, design, and architecture. Most of the things that we see a lot of programmers spending their time thinking about, writing about, and writing code for fall under a class of problems that, while important and necessary, often seem to me as those under that oft cited line in most academic papers: "a simple matter of programming, left to the reader."