Well, although I did enjoy the rails framework quite a bit, it's certainly not the first framework I've ever worked with. I've built applications with struts, ASP.Net (1.0 and 2.0), JSF, Django, etc, and I really do think rails is my favorite yet. My apologies if that offended you at all, I'll try to retain a little more cynicism next time.
;)
Welcome! You are going to enjoy frameworks! They are really cool!
Those of us who don't have the time to try out so many new things would appreciate an essay on the subject of "why I, as a brand-new user, found Rails so much more fun than Django or .Net". If nothing else, it would be fun to have an iota of actual evidence that I can cite when I'm patting myself on the back for having chosen Ruby and Rails over the others.
Don't become cynical right away. The framework community is awash in cynics at the moment. There's a backlash, dontcha know, because folks are aghast that after three whole years of hard work Fred Brooks is still right: Rails and Django and CakePHP haven't made web programming as easy as sneezing. It's still just web programming. You type, and you type some more, and you get a brief glimpse of joy, and then you fire up IE 6.0, and you burst into tears. Some things never change.
See? Working too hard at the coal face can make me cynical too. So for god's sake have some fun and be proud of having fun. We could all use some enthusiasm!
Nah don't be cynical. I'm pretty sure most people had the same glowing reaction the first time they used Rails (or something like it). Heck, I still have to use Hibernate at the day job, so getting home to ActiveRecord and DataMapper just makes my day all over again every night.
I think the guy's got a valid point, although perhaps not related directly to the "quantity" of work that you do. The real message here is "Follow this rule if you want to succeed: Whenever you're about to complain about something you haven't acheived, do something productive towards achieving it".
Personally, I'm suprised this train has generated as much steam as it has. The emotional intensity of the commentary wars between the "Arc Sucks" camp and the "You suck for thinking that Arc Sucks" camp is perhaps higher than the situation warrents. Those who like it will use it even in the absence of some important features, those who don't certainly don't have to (I daresay there are plenty of other programming languages for them to use). :-)
Joel makes a really good point in this article. We cannot prepare for every eventuality, and in fact it simple isn't cost effective to do so. The best we can do is plan for the things that are expected to go wrong, and make permenant fixes (either with technology or with processes) when things we don't expect come up.
I think the author of this article may have missed the boat on functional programming languages. After all, a functional paradigm is not the same as an object-oriented paradigm, so if a functional language is a little verbose when dealing with objects I don't think that disqualifies it as a useful language.
The joke is that he implies the languages' FP orentation causes them to have clunky ways to define classes. Ruby is a good counter to that argument. It has one of the cleanest class-defining syntaxes out there. And you can actually write your own functions that behave like "attr_accessor", making your class definitions even more readable.
Guess how you do it? A combination of metaprogramming and closures.
I'm not sure. You don't buy facebook apps, you just use them if someone else invite you to. Is it possible that the advertising revenue is deep enough to support a 50+ employee company?
Yes, in fact web advertising has proved to be deep enough to support all of Google!
Of course there is a limit to the total amount of advertising dollars available and many half-good companies may not be good enough to support themselves with advertising, but there is no question that a good company can do very well on advertising alone.
What a toll this kind of thing must take on oneself. I mean, in some ways it's good, becuase there's nothing that will make you appreciate the absence of pain like the prolonged presence of it. Still, his wrists were a mess, he was developing gastro-intestinal disorders, and I'm pretty sure he didn't have any friends during that time period.
I like the way this guys describes the technique of visualization. Some people have taken the idea of "visualizing" a goal and have forwarded the claim that the visualization will CAUSE the world to bend to your will.
The author displays the missing piece of the puzzle when he says that visualization will make you more AWARE so as to take advantage of opportunities that will lead to your goal.
