spilog

Wow what an amazing rant, back in September Steve Yegge posted an absolutely amazing rant on programming in the browser swamp.

Here are some choice quotes. But just go read the whole post yourself, it is worth it, that is if you are into technology.

Like, the kind of radical simplification Ruby on Rails introduced for server-side web programming. Yeah, yeah, I know, you hate Ruby because it’s not the language you learned at your mother’s teat, for God’s sake. Despite Ruby’s near-perfect Conceptual Integrity Index, you’d sooner quit your job and become a sanitation engineer than spend a day or three just learning the language and being done with it.

Which is in no small part why you keep hearing about Ruby on Rails, even though you really just wish it would go away so you don’t have to learn it.

People want Rails to go away because it has Ruby in the name: you can’t use it like a library, nooooo, it has to be in some other language, and other languages are bad by axiomatic decree. Programmers are lazy: they’ve found that the greedy algorithm gets them there with the least energy expenditure most of the time, and switching languages requires much more energy than integrating a new library, no matter how godawfully complex and ultimately useless the library is. Which is why the Java community is thrashing around with like 50 competing frameworks for server side web programming. Oh, and the Python community too. And, um, all of the rest of them too.