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.
;)
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.
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?
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.
That was really enjoyable. Practical and amusing. I sympathize, somewhat, with the plight of a career-writer. I have a hard enough time just getting a few blog posts up every week.
I disagree. It sounds like you work for a company who has their build process worked out really well, so fast changes are less impressive to you, but have you considered that maybe your company is not the average? I think it would be fair to say that most development shops are NOT that responsive to user changes because they don't have either the language features pg used, or a well-thought-out build process like your company.
If the article author works at one of those "average" shops, I think he has every reason to consider his experience on news.yc as a breath of fresh air and tell other people about it as an example.
Additionally, I think part of what impressed the author so much was that pg took the time to handle the request immediately. This isn't a site anyone pays to use, there's no revenue incentive, and the request was not the early stage of a riot, but they took care of it as though it was as important as a paying customer relationship, and that's not a response you expect from most web services. In fact, I think that may be what impressed the author more than just the speed of the fix.
I've had some thoughts in the past about a couple different mobile applications that would benefit from location data. It looks like the dev platform these guys are building could be the answer.
I don't know. You can't say that "They would not become advanced" just because they had a religious or superstitious outlook. What is to prevent an alien race that attributes their existence to a higher power from achieving technological progress? Would you also say then that our scientists of today who are advancing our level of technology are by definition irreligious?
Likewise, a warlike race of aliens is not hard to imagine. Wars are "expensive" in that they cost lots of money, but when america wages war the money that is spent in such great amounts is spent on American troops and government contractors, who in turn take the money they earned and spend it on other goods, so it does not "destroy" the money. In fact, war is generally an economy booster. As far as the destruction of resources, assume this hypothetical alien race is warlike toward OTHER species, not internally. The things they are destroying, then, are not on their homeworld, but on the worlds of those they conquer, and every world they conquer is another batch of resources for them to sap before moving on.
I just think you can't really predict the way another race would develop based on a random sample of 1 (humans).
I remember when the original offer from Oracle came out in october. The company I was working for then had an Oracle database and had just switched app-servers from Tomcat to Weblogic, so the idea of both coming under the same banner was not an unpleasent one.
Oracle's been doing a lot of acquisitions recently. I wonder who's next on their laundry list.
After searching for correlating articles, I believe that this article jumped the gun. It's cool to speculate on what would happen if we made contact with an alien civilization, but it appears this is premature for the particular signal they're talking about. See here:
It's the dream, for a company like MySQL. Build it until the community loves your product, and then cash in when you get acquired. Congrats to those guys for succeeding. I can only hope that I'll one day be fist-bumping with a major technology player who recently acquired one of my products (don't we all?).