Large organizations sometimes fall into the bad habit of marketing through
fear. IBM once had this reputation—their sales folks would sow FUD
(
Fear, Uncertainty, and
Doubt) in customers contemplating solutions from other vendors. The
practice is now (sadly) widespread, particularly among larger organizations
whose product lines have ossified somewhat.
One of the convenient things about FUD is that it’s easy. Unlike real
marketing analyses, where you have to understand both your products and the
opposition’s products, you can play the FUD game from a position of
total ignorance. "Sure, they claim they can do that, but that
must be too good to be true. Clearly there must be a catch, and they must
be scum for not telling you what it is. Better stick with us…"
It’s interesting to see that Rails seems to be attracting its share
of FUD. After Curt Hibbs wrote an OnLamp
article about Rails, David Geary dismissed its claims out of hand,
ending with Here, you
take this ROR koolaid. I'll stick with the JSF flavor. (Although David
clearly should have washed his hands. Some Koolaid powder must have stuck,
as last night he gave a talk to the Denver Jug (here’s a writeup) extolling the 5-10x
productivity gains in Rails, and he and Bruce Tate are writing a Rails
book).
Now we have Patrick Peak comparing
the professional way Java applications are deployed with the clearly
amateurish hacks of Ruby developers (Quotes like Assuming Rails
developers use source control give you the overall flavor). This piece
is great—he even says in it "Well, honestly, I don’t know
for certain what this looks like…" before going on to make up a
set of practices followed by Rails developers, and then criticising them.
Fortunately, Jamis Buck took the time to describe how deployment
works at 37signals.
I normally don’t like all these rounds of attack/defend blog posts
that seem to crop up. But at the same time, I really don’t
like the way that ignorance is used as a weapon. It belittles the
discussion, reflects badly on the poster, and alienates communities that
have a lot to learn from each other. I give Ruby and Rails talks to Java
developers most weeks, and I find genuine interest and honest questions. I
respect that, and try to learn from it. So let’s ty to keep it at
that level, and leave the FUD to the suits, eh?
