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by DeepDuh 4852 days ago
Yes, the comment quality on HN seems to be quite bad when it comes to Heroku threads. Why do so many CS professionals appear to be attaching themselves emotionally to software tools? That's pretty much what I have to conclude if you can't admit that this PaaS provider has screwed up and deserves more scrutiny when deciding for the platform of your next project/migration.

Isn't one of the great things about the Software startup scene that we can decide freely on what tools to use? Except for very niche markets we always have alternatives, even if it means a bit more work on our sides.

2 comments

I'm not really certain why, but there is a much greater tendency for members of the Ruby community to get emotionally attached to certain tools or services, and to defend them unequivocally, even when this is completely unjustified.

I haven't seen this to such a high degree with any other programming language/platform/technology community. Yes, there are developers in these communities who do prefer certain tools, but they're generally reasonable when it comes to criticism of these tools, or the suggestion of using alternatives. It's much rarer to see this when dealing with Ruby developers.

On more than one occasion, I've witnessed several different Ruby developers yell and scream in meetings when told they can't use a particular library or framework. I've never seen this kind of reaction from the many Java, C#, C, C++, Fortran, COBOL, Ada, Perl or Python developers I've worked with over the years, for instance.

Everyone knows Heroku screwed up, there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.
there not much left to say about that part of this story... so then we get to the application.

If we're going to be bikeshedding, why bikeshed RapGeinus' rails app, surely Heroku's request routing is a more meaty and exciting problem to talk about? Or is it simply because rails is a known quantity it is easier to fling shit at RG for not having the foresight to make exactly the decisions that are obvious to people with hindsight and an incomplete view of their application?

Nobody's bikeshedding anything.... Heroku have admitted it's a real problem, they have begun addressing it and increasing visibility and awareness into it. There is no news or data being added at this point, it's just RG retelling the exact same story.

And the story includes an application where visible parts of a second are used to construct their pages one very slow request at a time (regardless of what Heroku adds) which is interesting for a lot of us because that's not how many other platforms work.