Rails uptake analysis

July 19, 2006

Couldn’t think of a better title for this, but it’s not that newsworthy or anything - I’m just putting this here because it’s one of the better explanations of why some advocacy works and some doesn’t, yet still succint…

http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/4104

The part that caught my eye was some of a response, which I’ll quote here…

This is the problem I’ve had with Rails so far — all the promotional material is full of indirect insults to everything else. The Rails camp makes it completely clear that this is a huge advance over everything else and that all the other platforms and frameworks have been doing it all wrong and that Rails is the one, true platform that finally understands the problem like no one else ever has.

I’m trying to get past that and embrace Rails because it’s so good, but to do this I’ve had to look past a lot of stuff that alienates the hell out of non-Rails developers. All the material on Rails has a huge “you’re an idiot because you haven’t been doing it this way all along” subtext to it.

That and: “Forget everything you know, because it’s all been a waste of time. All those years you spent perfecting your [insert your platform here] skills — a complete waste. Throw it all away and we’ll teach you the right way to do it.”

Very well put, imo.

Posted in Development, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Web, opensource