Comment by dhh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhh | Hacker News Reader

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This is a very shallow analysis of a fast-moving community, but I can sympathize how it's the easiest way to make yourself content with using the same tools as you did three years ago. If you feel like you're getting stuff done to the best of your abilities with your current toolset, enjoy!

The Ruby and Rails community is lead by individuals who are never happy with the status quo. There are always things that bugs me about development. As soon as I solve one problem, the next in line gets promoted and I work on that. I find that incredibly rewarding.

It does come with the cost of blink-and-you've-missed-the-bleeding-edge. Which I understand that not everyone has the mental bandwidth (not as a sign of intelligence, but as one of priorities) to keep up with. That's OK. You'll still be better off with just taking a snapshot of the state of the art every 9-12 months than just tuning out.

Also, you're setting up a false dichotomy between caring about the tools and the domain. The vast majority of developers I've found that can't help constantly improving their toolset is the same kind that can't help improving their understanding of their domain. In fact, one often leads to the other. I've created lots of Rails features that were directly related to a deeper understanding of the project domain, for example.

I love Ruby. I love Rails. I don't love that Rails 2.2.2 doesn't work well with the version of Ruby Gems 1.3.6, which I have to have on my machine for my Rails 2.3.4 projects. Can I just upgrade the 2.2.2 project? No because it's not mine...it's a client's project. etc... This happens to me all the time.

The problem isn't mental bandwidth. It's more along the lines of the "Consistency-Atomicity-Partition Tolerance" debate related to databases and the noSQL movement. Perhaps it's the "Creativity-Velocity-Supportability" triangle - Ruby/Rails leans toward the "Creativity/Velocity" - it's fun to use, the community is very creative and the framework moves fast. It's harder to support old projects as time goes by because the framework moves on and old projects break.

I'm consciously choosing the higher supportability cost of older code because of the fact that I love writing code with Ruby and Rails. It's still a cost I have to be aware of when I start a new Rails project.

EDIT: I reread the comment and I retract "This is a subtle ad-hominem attack on someone making a very legitimate point about the community."

When I first read it, I thought that he meant "mental bandwidth" and "shallow" as attacks and i can see he wasn't implying it that way...

This is a subtle ad-hominem attack on someone making a very legitimate point about the community.

I think you've got it backwards; DHH gave a very legitimate response to someone making a subtle ad-hominem attack on the Ruby community.

Instead of addressing the rapid evolution of the Ruby community on its merits (or lack thereof), the phenomenon is reduced to "ADD," "distraction," and an obsession with coolness.

There couldn't possibly be any merit to, for instance, embracing Git or REST: we're all just trying to be cool. "Very shallow analysis of a fast-moving community" is right on target IMO.

Agreed. I re-read it and agree DHH's response is legit. However, I don't see the original comment as an attack on the community as much as a (warranted) critique of the community being over-focused-on and at times distracted-by, 'cool'.

That's not what ad hominem means. Ad hominem is when you disagree with an idea because of who supports it. For example, "gun control is a bad idea because Hitler believed in it".

No, it's not. Ad hominem is when you argue that something wrong with the person invalidates the person's argument. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

That's an association fallacy, not an ad-hominem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Ad-hominem is where you use qualities of the arguer as disproof of the argument.

> Ad-hominem is where you use qualities of the arguer as disproof of the argument.

Right, which is what he didn't do. "I don't like Rails because DHH has an ugly hairdo" would have been an ad hominem. In this case, he is disagreeing with the idea itself.

No, that would have merely been an ill-informed opinion and a non-sequitor. One can feel however one wants about a subject and for any reason and still not commit a logical fallacy because feelings are a-logical. For an actual fallacy, we need actual premises: "Ruby is good," "Rails is bad," etc.

An ad-hominem is even more specific. The premise must be disputed because of the arguer. So, if DHH makes statements about Ruby or Rails, and one argues that those statements are false because of DHH's hairdo, then that would be an ad-hominem.

FWIW, see RVM, which lets you painlessly manage multiple Ruby versions on a system, even on a per-project basis:

http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rvm/basics/

Agreed, it basically solved the having a really old rails and a really new rails on the same machine issue.

Honestly have rails 2.2.2 and old rubygem, along with rails 2.3.4 and rubygem 1.36 has never been easier. Thanks goes to the RVM project for simplifying keeping around different stacks of Ruby.

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