Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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