Do as I say, but don’t do as I say, oh wait … Joel Spolsky confuses the hell out of me. Act I, in which he says: “None of them are failing because of the choice of technology.” Act II, in which he reclaims: “The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line?” Act III, in which he states: “The safe answer, for the Big Enterprisy Thing where you have no interest in being on the cutting edge, is C#, Java, PHP, or Python”. Act IV, in which he concludes: “FogBugz is written in Wasabi, .. a private, in-house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized specifically for developing FogBugz”. So which is it?
Not safe for work. Unlike Loud Thinking, who linked to Joel and called it FUD, I do agree with one statement he makes, though not the timeline. Ruby is not safe for Enterprisey things. And it won’t be until it shows up here.
I know you are, but what am I? Matz agrees with Joel: only trust yourself and vendors with big booth spaces. (Via why)
Learn on the side. “Microsoft’s PR agency admits it doesn’t “get” blogs!”. I’m not going to link to the article since this post has nothing to do with the conversation. TechMeme it if you want to read the love/hate responses. What I want to do is share a little bit of experience. Best way I know to learn something new is to try it out. Blogging is writing, but unlike any other writing I did before. It’s not books or magazine articles or technical specs or press releases. Sure the same language skills apply, spelling for one, but it’s written and edited in a different way. And it’s easy to try out, find some subject you like and start blogging about it. No pressure to do the same old, no consequences for failing. In fact, if you don’t have a passion that lets you try out new things outside your deadline-driven day job, I argure you’re not doing your best job.
I did it once and I can undo it again. William Coleman is going to out-do BEA by, well, undoing BEA. Take out the high price, expensive support contract and Enterprisey features. The details are a bit sketchy, it is after all a Fortune fluff piece, but we know it’s called the Cheap Revolution. In other words, everyone will undermine cheap by selling it for less. Sarcasm aside, this is great news for customers who want good technology and don’t want to pay excessive margins for big vendors. Oh wait, those are already using open source technologies and simpler tools. I think the value proposition is more like “you can’t get fired for downloading PHP”.