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0 pointspilif15y ago0 comments

I agree that the end bit might have come out a bit too personal. I wrote this after reading the excellent linked article and then seeing the first comment on HN which was

"Why not transition to a different language over time? One that more great programmers want to use?" which just isn't something you'd realistically do.

And then I thought about the fun we have here in the office and I thought about the nearly two hours of discussion I had with a fellow coworker about race- and lock free storage and merging of shopping baskets and it hurt me to think that people would throw all that away just because they don't like the language even though it was the only viable option when all of this started.

I might have been carried away.

So: Sorry. I didn't mean to insult anybody. I just think it's really shortsighted to judge a project, a team and a company based on the choice of language that might have been used at one time.

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billybob15y ago

I'm leaving a PHP job soon to start a Ruby job. The language was not the decisive factor, but it was a factor - I wanted to move to Ruby at some point.

The company I'm leaving solves complex, interesting problems in solid PHP code. There are developers here who are a lot smarter than I am. So my attitude is far from "you guys suck" or "I'm better than you."

But when I look out over the programming landscape, I see a lot more energy and activity right now in the Ruby community. A lot more people building new things and inventing new best practices. This is a simplification, but it seems like great ideas come from Rails and move back to PHP eventually.

PHP jobs run the gamut from high-tech and awesome to grunt work. Rails jobs tend to be more cutting-edge, because the technology is newer and there's just more stuff happening there.

So for me, the question is this: if the Ruby / Rails community is the leading edge for new ideas, and the AVERAGE (not to say all) developer in that community is better, and the AVERAGE job in that language / framework is cooler, doesn't it make sense for me to move that way? All other things being equal, isn't that a good career move?

It isn't snobbery, it seems like the most pragmatic thing to do. This is on top of the fact that I genuinely like the Ruby language a lot more than PHP.

So I don't think you have to feel slighted personally. And I'd expect this cycle to repeat someday: there will be a lot of Ruby / Rails apps that need maintaining, and a lot of developers will prefer some hotter, newer thing. Just the way it goes. But it's nothing personal.

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