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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

When Github started, they didn't just use Rails: they used Rails and shelled out to command line programs to integrate with git. If you have misgivings about engineering at Github now (I don't; I have the opposite of misgivings about they way they handle software), imagine a site built in the equivalent of shell scripts.

I think the short answer is probably, nobody at Github has a lot of macro-level regrets at this point.

I think the real issue is that the Rails community should be supremely grateful that they have a team like Github's building on the framework they've chosen. They all get to draft off the deployment/security/development/reliability work Github sinks into the platform.

And, painful though it will surely be for HN to hear this, snags like the one today are how frameworks eventually get to be solid. Spent much time looking at Java Spring's track record?

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I think people forget how transformative Rails was. When it came out it blew people away. We all make fun of the 15 min blog today, but at the time it was really impressive. Nowadays it's not so amazing by comparison because everyone's caught up.

Honestly, I think it's great that this all gets aired out in the open. The amount of transparency behind all of this is a breath of fresh air.

Rails has had its share of growing pains; it really sucks that a security patch had a regression and I think this gave people a lot of flash backs to the pre Rails 3 days. By the end of this, however, we'll end up having a solid security infrastructure.

I'm willing to wager that 90% of the time these kinds of issues just get swept under the rug and silently patched.

> I think people forget how transformative Rails was. When it came out it blew people away. We all make fun of the 15 min blog today, but at the time it was really impressive. Nowadays it's not so amazing by comparison because everyone's caught up.

This was true for young developers or people without the right experience developing web sites at the time.

Already in 1999 our company was using TCL framework built as Apache module that was quite similar to Rails. Following some designs similar to AOL Server.

We just happened to be in Portugal and never had the press coverage that Rails did.

By the time Rails appeared we had already moved into .NET/C++ to improve the scalability of our product.

The same scalability issues that Twitter, LinkedIn and other American companies found out with Rails while deciding to move to JVM based alternatives.

Thats why he says transformative. Most of the stuff in Rails was "nothing new", but they got it all together in a package, relased it and _advertised why you should do stuff like that_.

The technology behind Rails is was nothing new, it was just very well applied in a fresh language.

>>This was true for young developers or people without the right experience developing web sites at the time.

Very true. Transformative my ass. I was already pretty efficient at building websites without rails.

It was transformative, it just wasn't for you. It made me enjoy building websites significantly more than doing them with PHP and HTML did, and whilst there's always been other options none of them were as simple to get running as Rails.

I'm probably not the only one who found it transformative, you're probably not the only one who didn't, and that's fine. A piece of technology doesn't have to be useful to everyone to be transformative.

What company in Portugal do you work for?

That company was called Intervento, before they were acquired by EasyPhone and together became what is known nowadays as Altitude Software.

I live in Germany nowadays.

I wasn't blown away. Nobody on my team was blown away. If you had pretty much no real experience then maybe you were blown away....

What blows me away is just how many arrogant programmers there actually are out there..

I agree, it's massively arrogant to think your platform of choice was a real game changer because of your ignorance as to what other people were already doing.

I'd be interested on which MVC framework you feel in the web community changed the whole conversation on how to develop web applications before Rails became popular. Maybe you could school us on this alternate history?

Personally, I have a different recollection. I seem to remember the PHP MVC frameworks and ASP.Net MVC and and whatever the hell Java people use all came out because Rails and Django became popular. I do remember Django helped but as an outsider to the two frameworks I seemed to get the feeling Rails was clearly the thought leader.

The Java ecosystem had MVC a long time before .NET and a long time before rails mvc was even conceived. You seem to be missing a chunk of history.

Rails made MVC popular among lesser developers (bottom feeders, small projects, not much money - this may have changed now). A lot of organisations were using MVC as an enterprise design pattern a long time ago.

I think smalltalk devs were using the MVC pattern in the 80's and it's been in various Java enterprise stacks for a very very long time. It seems that everyone else caught up when being a low paid front end 'developer' became cool in the USA.

"Controller Model View Controller (MVC) is one of the most quoted (and most misquoted) patterns around. It started as a framework developed by Trygve Reenskaug for the Smalltalk platform in the late 1970s. Since then it has played an influential role in most UI frameworks and in the thinking about UI design."

- http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/modelViewController.h...

"We all make fun of the 15 min blog today, but at the time"

I made fun of it at the time. "Great! Now audit and deploy it."

I remember building pseudo-blog-like thing with an ISAPI web application in Delphi with WebSnap back in... 2001? Simply by dragging and dropping components and filling in a few things like table names and columns.

Understand, that doesn't take away from Rails' achievements, but it does underline that people in tech, especially web stuff, have a very short memory.

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