Will Ruby and Rails save my IT Department?
My client is not an IT person and he knows nothing about programming…. I started sharing [Ruby on Rails] with him…. About ten minutes into my presentation he interrupted me and said, “So, this could save my IT department, couldn’t it?”
This is from Dave Thomas’ blog, where he is quoting an e-mail where Eric Knapp just gushes about the possibilities that Rails brings to the table. It seems nice enough, and everybody is well intentioned. But, I must admit I have my doubts. First of all, it sounds like a thousand non-technical managers getting sold on some new technology without taking time to understand the real life benefits and risks.
But it goes further than that, I doubt that Rails will ever save anybody’s IT department.
Can it make IT departments more productive? Absolutely. But when a department is broken that’s not usually just because they have bad tools, it’s because the staff either aren’t interested in finding better tools, or they are crippled by organizational red tape, or they are too afraid to tell management that the current tools suck.
“Whatever they say the problem is, it’s always a people problem.”
– Gerald Weinberg
Rails, TurboGears, Django, Plone, and even Zope and EJB 3 all offer the hope of more productive web development. Better tools are important. But a growing, healthy, team can discover, evaluate and when necessary the fit between these new tools and their current projects is the critical factor in long term success.
Rails may appear to be the world saving framework today. But it is not the end of the road, people are hard at work inventing better tools (for example, SQLAlchemy is poised to become a far better Dynamic Language based ORM than ActiveRecord), and if your team can’t evaluate new tools as they come they will end up stuck when Ruby on Rails is surpassed by other tools.
If you Rails is the end of the line, rather than just a remarkable jump forward –which will itself be left behind by new tools in the future — you’ve been fooled by the hype machine.
By the way, since I’ve noticed a few people in the Rails/Ruby community have a thin skin, this whole post should in no way be understood anti-rails. The problem is not the technology it is the marketing and the the uncontrolled hype which doesn’t admit the limitations of the technology.
But, in the same way that Rails won’t save your IT Department, TurboGears will not save you, nor will Zope, or EJB 3.
You have to save yourselves by becoming a place where software teams have the freedom to learn, grow and experiment with new tools.