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Please Tell Me This Is Satire

Ovid on 2008-04-29T08:49:08

A comment on this anti-Rails rant reads:

Well my application is an online blog post management system with over 1400 database tables and I was pretty annoyed when Rails wouldn't let me use VARCHAR(400) as primary keys. We ended up ditching Rails for PHP 3.2 and I'll have to say I'm so happy now that I don't have to drink the kool-aid of DHH and all these Rails "n-00-bs". Perhaps people should think harder before becoming so arrogant and preachy about things like YAML and Dane Driven Development (DDD).

Ignoring all of the obnoxious bits of this comment, I'll just agree that Railss shouldn't forbid the use of VARCHAR(400) as primary keys. Being competent should forbid the use of VARCHAR(400) as primary keys.

That's a lotta tables...

AndyArmstrong on 2008-04-29T11:41:14

And 1400 tables sounds pretty ominous too...

It obviously is

Aristotle on 2008-04-29T21:27:54

Several of the major pro-/anti-Rails-hype spats are recognisable in there.

  1. “Scaffolding is a toy.” (Rails screencasts almost inevitably tend to be demonstrations of building blog engines built in five minutes.)
  2. ActiveRecord lacks support for composite primary keys and in fact for any SQL schema that does not follow a narrow set of conventions.
  3. Derek Sivers ditched Rails in favour of PHP for CDBaby, found himself very pleased at the result, and wrote about it, causing a huge outrage.
  4. DHH is notorious for opining in a purposely controversial way.
  5. The Rails bloggers are constantly told they are a hype echo chamber and face ridicule over their use of I-know-it-when-I-see-it labels for old concepts, like “DSL” and “BDD.”

But if any of that doesn’t convince you, “PHP 3.2” should be the clincher – I mean, c’mon.