[matt4077]

No, absolutely not. It’s myopic to even entertain the possibility. At least in web dev, which I have experienced.

For some reason people still love to criticize browsers, even though they have improved dramatically. Around 2000, every UI required two or three versions. Once you got it done in Firefox, you would start on the IE version, which would take almost as much time as the first implementation. Then, you’d repeat the process for each point release of IE.

On the server, rails was the big revolution. The big achievement of DHH wasn’t so much techical as social: here, you had an extremely well-curated set of best practices, smuggled into your project under the guise of a framework. Before, you’d join a team and find the database password was in a switch block three levels deep in config/real/colors.inc.php3.~bac.php. Suddenly, you could join any team and know your way around the codebase on the second day.

Many other things that used to be major work items have become trivially easy. It would routinely take me a day or so just to get somewhat recent versions of Apache, php, and MySQL (and all their libraries) to compile on a new server. You’d encounter all sorts of difficult-to-debug networking problems when moving to production. There were certain tasks that seem like they should be trivial, but were actually terribly difficult to pull off in the web stack, such as chats.