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Comment by fauigerzigerk | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps you should leave comments about my personality to those who actually know me. But if you insist on talking about character traits, let me say this to you: People who don't know where to compromise and where not to comproise generally make bad software.

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That's a fair call - I don't know you and I am speaking about character traits.

I don't feel your original comment reflected a position on knowing where to (or not) compromise, you made a strong assertion to take one option off the table in all situations.

In my experience, developers who are make blanket rules up front about what can and can't be changed in the future development of a system don't end up making much of value.

That's just my perspective, and I apologise if I've misread your character.

What I really wanted to express is a dissatisfaction with a general attitude among some framework makers towards performance. Of course there are exceptions to every rule. If the slowdown of ActiveRecord was down to fixing a dangerous security bug or possible loss of data, that would be such an exception. But piling on new features in a way that degrades performance needs to stop somewhere. Hard constraints are good to focus the mind even if you accept rare exceptions.

Compromises from whose point of view? One man's good compromise is another man's bad compromise.

All I can do is state my own point of view as clearly as I can. And my point of view is already a compromise. I didn't say make it as fast as possible even if you have to rewrite it in assembly. I didn't even say, don't write it in Ruby. All I said is don't make it significantly slower than it was before. That doesn't seem like such a big ask.

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