The Fan Syndrome | Hacker News Reader

The Fan Syndrome

beust.com

14 pointsbillmcneale8 comments

Interesting analysis of how people can't seem to differentiate between technologies they like from technologies that are going to succeed.

Open articleView on HN

I try not to reply to people who have fan syndrome. If I point out a negative in something and that makes someone think I hate it, it's not worth trying to debate with them. They aren't receptive. They won't learn anything.

Even worse, I find those people can usually only parrot back the same things they've heard someone else say. I can't even learn anything from them!

Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's concept that ideas are a form of social currency. Agreeing with somebody makes them your friend and disagreeing makes them your enemy. He suggests that this is why bad ideas don't die in Breakfast of Champions

The conclusions of this article are a bit hasty.

Firstly there are other reasons politicians could want to save face other than that they think they are the best candidate, and secondly the outcome of a football game is much much less determined by the support of its fans than the success of RoR. The analogies aren't particularly useful.

I liked the article, but I'm confused: RoR hasn't taken over the world?

"This entry was posted on December 15, 2005, 7:57 am"

Quick fact checking:

Job offers on Dice.com:

Java: 16837

Javascript: 10161

C#: 8011

Ruby: 1707

Ruby on Rails: 679

Scala: 82

Market share on Tiobe:

Java (#1): 18.5%

C (#2): 16.27%

Ruby (#11): 1.48%

Scala: not in the top 20

So, the article is right: Ruby on Rails is still quite niche.

(can't believe HN won't let me format this comment better than that)

This data is not picked fairly. I suggest we only look into webdev jobs, then Ruby should be somewhere at the top.

Look at the position of Javascript. It's fair to say it's used exclusively for web development (node.js is quite marginal) and it still tops the job chart.

Ruby on Rails would be there as well if it were mainstream.

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