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Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

... because it's impossible to find a Merb programmer? Sure Rails beats the shit out of ASP.NET but good Rails programmers are rare, expensive and have very cocky attitudes. It has been a major, major problem for us, to a point where I've started thinking that doing a project in ASP.NET can actually be cheaper and more pleasant experience.

With Merb, I am afraid this issue will be even more pronounced. Merb isn't as widespread, and seems to be technically solid. This, I suspect, will only give these Ruby assholes more reasons to bring all that elitist crap to the party.

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That's a lot of poor speculation. If you explore Merb and its community more, you will see that the elitism is pretty much non-existent. Merb is extremely new, so of course it does not have as many developers as more mature frameworks. When Rails came out of the gates, you could have said the exact same thing.

I wasn't implying anything about Merb community, just pointing out that switching to a new development platform can bring surprises from quite unexpected angles.

The big difference here is that when Rails came out it solved a real problem. Every other popular web technology at the time was much, much harder to use and slower to develop in. Since then it's acquired some inevitable complexity but most of that was in response to somebody's need for a feature. Merb will accumulate the same complexity if it's successful.

To me this just sounds like Common Lisp vs Scheme all over again.

Merb will accumulate the same complexity if it's successful.

Not likely. Merb will accumulate plugins. Rails had most of its complexity, or at least signs of it, from the beginning.

I have been interacting with the merb community for over a year and have never had a negative experience interacting with anyone (google groups, IRC, etc). I really can't speak for the Rails community. I dumped Rails for tech reasons not community ones. And don't worry about the "ruby assholes", good talent with the right attitude is available. I know quite a few if you need some recommendations.

Very true.

One thing that has stung me about Rails is the conceit; if you have a requirement that runs against the grain, Rails developers seem to have no problem in saying "that's stupid; you shouldn't want that."

I understand your sentiment, but you can override a lot of things in rails. On the whole 80/20 percent thing, your 20 percent might going against the grain of the core ideas of rails, but you still can get around it. If rails isn't a fit for your project/product I don't think you should force it.

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