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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

DHH certainly isn't even attempting to hide his tone of this post (obviously he is not a big fan of the Twitter guys) but I can't help but agree. If you want something done put some effort into doing yourself instead of putting your effort into whining about it. 75 lines of Ruby, wow.

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I don't think the number of lines is too much of an indicator for the effort involved. Before you can write those 75 lines, you have to understand Rails well enough to be able to write them. Beforehand, you might not even now that it will "only" be 75 lines - and how long does it take you to know?

This is an important point. Saying that someone can go and add this or that feature to a framework requires that they first have enough understanding to know where to begin. In Rails, this can be less than obvious.

To say "... extending Rails to do what you want is often much simpler than you think" is disingenuous at best.

If you are running a website that is the biggest site on the internet running that framework though you should have an inside-out understanding of the technology you are using.

"If you are running a website that is the biggest site on the internet running that framework though you should have an inside-out understanding of the technology you are using."

Well, I bet that's true now.. Or will be..

But I can't imagine anyone not building or releasing a Web app until they have an inside-out understanding of the technology.

Assuming they have some means to monetize their traffic, they can now go hire someone to fix a problem most people wish they had.

Sure, probably you should have written your own Ruby Virtual Machine, too, just to be on the safe side. And while you are at it, why not create your own replacement for Rails as well?

You don't have to be an asshole. How hard do you think it would be grok the source of the Rails database adapters, probably not that hard.

Granted, 75 lines of Ruby represents a substantial amount of logic.

I was going to make a joke about this topic before I read your comment but this is actually true.

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