Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by npsimons 4956 days ago
"A poor workman blames his tools."

. . . but even a master carpenter can't build a house out of rotten wood. Of course, to me, rotten wood is OSX and Windows (why anyone would build servers on those instead of one of the BSDs or Linux, I'll never know; to me, development is also incredibly painful on Windows and OSX), but Ubuntu is not without issues. The rallying cry of "usability first!" is all well and good, until things like taking shortcuts by way of binary drivers causes crashes. Still, one has to wonder why they didn't just try another distro. If you think your tools (or your "lumber") are the problem, try different ones.
1 comments
cheald 4956 days ago
Lots of people successfully run Rails on Ubuntu in production. I don't think it's fair to cry "rotten wood" here, unless the Rails ecosystem is flush with amazing systems wizards who can work around crippling flaws in the OS to run their software.
link
npsimons 4956 days ago
I don't think it's fair to cry "rotten wood" here, unless the Rails ecosystem is flush with amazing systems wizards who can work around crippling flaws in the OS to run their software.

Agreed; however, if they were having problems with Ubuntu (or indeed Linux in general), why didn't they try something else? That's the quick and easy way to see if it's really the platform or your application that's the problem (quick tip from my own userland developer experience: it's almost always not the platform; the times I've had Linux crash on me I could always trace to one of three things: 1) flaky hardware, 2) binary drivers, or 3) I was mucking about in kernel space ;)

link
cheald 4955 days ago
What really blows my mind is that they did a regressive rewrite to Rails 2 rather than learn to use profiling tools.

The whole situation just makes my brain stare blankly and wonder what on earth was happening over there.

link
ahoyhere 4955 days ago
Yes, because it's not like Thomas (my partner/husband) is a performance expert or anything. And it's not like 3-4 Rails Core team members who tried very hard to help us have ever heard of profiling tools.

My mind just exploded, too, due to your willful inability to read the details.

link