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Comment by rhizome | Hacker News Reader

For the record, and this is supported by its absence in the linked post, nobody ever said it was a silver bullet. It's a rhetorical strawman that he doesn't bother knocking down, so don't get hung up on the title.

That said, Charm appears to have had quite a bit of unnecessary platform spread. I smell cowboy-architecting (vis a vis cowboy coding), but it's hard to tell because he doesn't describe the process by which they chose to go the route they did, which would have added a ton more value to the post.

Lastly, it's a little odd to me that he seems to contradict himself at the end, saying "don't repeat yourself," immediately after recommending the tools he's used for a long time. By my interpretation his implied moral to the story is, "we should have repeated ourselves."

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'Lastly, it's a little odd to me that he seems to contradict himself at the end, saying "don't repeat yourself," immediately after recommending the tools he's used for a long time. By my interpretation his implied moral to the story is, "we should have repeated ourselves."'

That's not what "don't repeat yourself" means. Building things using tools and patterns you've used before, refined by the experience, is a great thing (other things being equal). "Don't repeat yourself" means primarily "don't put the same info in multiple places such that differences between those copies is yet another thing that can break."

It's marketed as a silver bullet.

Here are some snippets from the ember.js Homepage: "Write dramatically less code", "Don't waste time", "Ember.js is built for productivity".

If you're building the kind of app that Ember is designed for, all of the above will be true. But we never anywhere claim that Ember is the right solution for every webapp. There's a definite type of app that doesn't benefit from Ember and I'll happily tell people that. There are also other simple widget based apps where I think Backbone is a good option.

Ember is not marketed as being for a specific type of app, and not for others. The sole hint to kind of app is "ambitious apps." As a reader, that seems like a challenge. Oh, I don't think ember is right for me? Must not be ambitious. Nowhere on the site that I can see is there a discussion of fit, or tradeoffs.

I'm not attacking Ember specifically. All the MVC frameworks' sites are the same in this regard: breathless boosterism, slathered in benefit-speke.

Hence the perception that it's a silver bullet.

That's a good point. We probably should add a section on helping users decide whether Ember is a good fit for their goals. While there's obviously some disagreement in this area, we can at least make it clear what sort of apps we intend Ember to be used for.

That would be a great move.

Basic Marketing 101: if you try to attract everyone, you will inevitably get a lot of people for whom the product is not ideal, and then they will be angry. And then there will be backlash.

Better to build your fences and make them clear so people are educated, instead of seduced.

You're quoting from the Ember website but your bad experience was with Backbone.js. In fact, Ember is designed to avoid the kind of deficiencies you hit in Backbone. Sounds like you should give Ember a try in your next app. ;)

How could you know enough to accuse us of being "cowboys"?

For the record, we chose carefully… after deciding to build fresh from what we had, to start with a live (client-side MVC) code base instead of shoehorning in AJAX interactivity here and there.

The simple fact is: that was also the wrong choice. But it was carefully done. That's the whole point of the post.

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