All Aboard

One of my favorite blogs just published a new essay All Aboard The Gravy Train:

Recently, some of the loudest rumblings have been coming from that quarter who current fascination is the scripting language Ruby, and its ORM library Rails. Think back to the last cycle of hype you saw in our industry, perhaps the Extreme Programming craze, and you’ll recognize many of the phenomena from that little reality excursion now reoccurring in the context of Rubyism. There are wild and unverifiable claims of improved productivity amidst the breathless ravings of fan boys declaring how cool it all is. There are comparisons against precursor technologies that highlight faults that are apparently obvious in hindsight, but which were significantly absent while those technologies were in fashion. And above all there is the frenetic scrambling of the “me too” crowd, rushing to see what the fuss is all about, desperately afraid that the bandwagon will pass them by, leaving them stranded in Dullsville, where nothing is cool and unemployment is at a record high.

It’s good to know that I’m not the only one out there with doubts about the quality of the software written by the jump-on-the-latest-bandwagon croud.
I’d just like to add one related comment: regardless of what the proponents of a certain programming language may tell you, you are not going to learn that language in 1 day, 1 week or even 1 month. It’s going to take you many years to be able to write reliable, secure, easy to maintain code with some speed. It will require a significant investment of time. Learning everything as you go is not sound software engineering. And also, the number of programming languages someone knows is not a good metric for how good of a programmer that person is.

Links:
Brooks’ No Silver Bullet or the entire The Mythical Man-Month.

Update (humorous): I just logged in to my desktop PC. Today’s fortune:

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.