Hacker News Reader

Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Looks really cool. It's definitely not cool though that Yehuda's keeps saying things like "Sinatra has failed because...", and "because Prototype sucks..." and so on. I'm only half way through the video, but it really bothers me when smart software developers disparage other open source projects that came before the latest shiny framework or tool. Especially when it's to brag about whatever project it is that they're currently working on. It's childish, rude, and basically makes you look like a dick no matter how whiz bang cool or better what you're currently working on actually is.

Some day, Rails 3.0 will be old news and I'm sure he won't appreciate it when some young kid gets on stage saying "Rails 3.0 sucked, how could they have been so stupid?! Look how much better my code is!"

Give credit where credit is due -- and remember we all stand on the shoulders of giants, show a little respect, eh?

View on HN

Yehuda didn't simply say that Sinatra failed. What he said was that Sinatra (and other similar projects) failed to achieve a critical mass of support. The reason for this failure was because these projects were trying to do fundamentally different things than what most people were actually doing with Rails at the time, and as a result, they didn't catch on.

This statement was made in comparison to merb, which succeeded in getting more mindshare than the other 'Rails competitors.' This was largely because merb attempted to do much the same things that Rails was trying to do, but to do them in a much better way.

He was indirectly positive about Sinatra throughout his talk, and when covering router changes, kept describing how you could mount Sinatra applications inside of your Rails3 app.

The "prototype sucks comment" was made along with a very tongue-in-cheek "everyone will move to jquery" comment. He was laughing when he said it, and I got the impression that he was simply making a joke as the author of jquery.

He never once said anyone was stupid. Actually, that's not entirely true, he was pretty critical about some of the code found in Rails 2.x. He backed his criticism up by showing the code, and I certainly didn't think he was out of line.

I haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, but one correction - John Resig is the original author of jQuery, Yehuda is on the core team.

"This was largely because merb attempted to do much the same things that Rails was trying to do, but to do them in a much better way."

Or maybe because Merb was done by people already hooked into the Rails community, and so could more easily get the attention of developers who don't otherwise seem interested in exploring other frameworks?

Nitro, for example, predated Merb (it came out at the same time as Rails) and was doing many things better than Rails (multi-threaded, easy to swap out ORMs, no boinking of built-in classes, Rack-like app request processing pipeline before there was Rack; much faster overall), but got almost zero traction. And I don't think it was because people tried it and didn't care for it, but because all the noise was (rather deliberately) about Rails.

There is a "winner takes all" mentality among some Rubyists that leads them to dismiss anything that isn't the clear leader. Sort of like high school kids who are afraid to be seen talking to the nerds because people might think them uncool.

One thing I've learned over the years is that there is a certain level of tact one needs to have when talking about other peoples' work. It's very easy for people to be offended when you talk about things they've worked on negatively. As I've matured as a software engineer I've come to realize that no, my code is not a beautiful unique snowflake, and yes, I am probably the dumbest guy in the room.

This means that generally I've shifted from the thinking "this other person's code is shit" to "I'm betting there was a reason they did it this way." As it turns out, there almost always is. With the benefit of hindsight, those reasons can sometimes seem foolish, but that's the thing about hindsight. More often than not though, once I take the time to understand them, the decisions of the original author turn out to be better than my knee-jerk response.

When your overall attitude is still in the "everyone else's code sucks" mindset it leaks out through your language, and I think that's what is happening here, however slightly. There is no reason to use the word "failed" or use the word "sucks" when talking about another person's work, particularly when it's work that people are using in production for free and work that is open sourced, like Sinatra or Prototype. Even moreso when you're promoting an iteration of improvements on a platform that benefits from the work and experience of many man-months of volunteers, an iteration that is still not even released yet.

> It's definitely not cool though that Yehuda's keeps saying things like "Sinatra has failed because..."

Agreed. That's apples and oranges! Rails and Sinatra are different tools for different problems, IMO.

> That's apples and oranges! Rails and Sinatra are different tools for different problems, IMO.

Actually no. With rails3, rails will just be a meta gem. If you install rails-core you'll get something like Rack plus not much more which is basically what sinatra is.

Ah, looks like I have some Rails 3 learnin' to do! Thanks! :)

Some day, code will be old news and I'm sure you people won't appreciate it when some young kid gets on stage saying "textual non-interactive computer code sucked, how could they have been so stupid?".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com