The Zeitgeist

I know how to program in a bunch of languages… some really, really old, like Algol-68, PL/1, Pascal, Modula-2 and MC680×0 Assembly Language. Some as mainstream as you can get, like C, Objective-C, Java, Perl and PHP. I’m a Unix guy so I also know several “shell” languages found in things like the C-Shell (and “tcsh”) and the Bourne/BASH shells. I even mess with these new fangled languages that all the kool kidz are using like Python and the darling of Web2.0 startups: Ruby on Rails.

For several years a groundswell has been building around Ruby (a language that feels like a semi-hybrid of Perl and Smalltalk + a smattering of various shells) and a series of libraries collectively known as Rails which as a toolset allows for some pretty rapid development of database-backed Web applications. The whole she’bang is often commonly referred to as Ruby-on-Rails — “RoR” or often just “Rails.”

Rails has been hailed as sort of a messiah of languages, if you believe its supplicants (and their VCs ), it’s all singing, all dancing and the greatest language EVAR. Lots of very popular Web2.0 apps have been written in it including: Campfire, BaseCamp and the incredibly popular Twitter.

Of course if you’ve been writing software long enough, you’ll have experienced a lot of “greatest language EVARs” … and a lot of “greatest” methodologies and “greatest” OSes and on and on. Well, there have been a whole lots of blow ups in the Rails community of late… The blog Juixe gives a good rundown on a set of explosions rocking the core of the Rails community. An even more dramatic rant has been developing from Zed Shaw who is the developer of Mongrel which is a web server and HTTP library optimized for and written in Ruby itself, and a core element of many apps developed and deployed with Rails. Zed’s rant is quite hyperbolic (and more profanity laced/infused/laden that I can describe — you have been warned) but it’s indicative of the depth of the turmoil in the ranks of the Rails elite.

What makes this so interesting is how it shows that no area of human activity, even something as traditionally insular as programming is immune from manias and bubbles. Probably the best analysis ever done on this phenomenon was written in 1841 by Charles MacKay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (here as an ebook from the Gutenberg Project). MacKay was the first to attempt to dissect popular manias that cause people to create speculative bubbles. (Just to be clear, I’m differentiating Rails as a mania affecting programmers in a particular community apart from the general Dot Com bubble that burst in 2000, or what some think is a “Web2.0″ bubble that may [or may not] be in progress now).

From a technical perspective what I find interesting isn’t that Rails is blowing up, but rather that it took so long for common sense to start filtering back into the Rails debate. For about 2 years rails has been seen as almost a Holy Grail: Make no mistake, Ruby+Rails is quite a nice language and framework for fast prototyping and proof of concept development; it’s got a lot of things going for it, and given enough time and experience it may yet take its place as a tried and true language …however the fact that it’s being pressed into service in so many high profile situations, many of which demand ever increasing levels of scalability and performance would be a serious stressor for any relatively young and dynamic programming environment (and, if you read some of these rants and critiques, its exactly that lack of scalability that threatens to kill Rails’ viability).

Sadly, the Internet doesn’t wait for things to mature, and bubbles are very unforgiving things.

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