A couple of days ago I was sent a link to Robert Cringely’s latest treatise: The second coming of Java – and to say I disagreed was a bit of an understatement. To me, it represents a fundamental flaw in his perception of developers, and more importantly the economics of software development.
The key to Cringely’s argument comes down to this:
When SSDs gain enough capacity there will be a shift from the Ruby world back to the Java world. Not for prototyping, because, well, it’s prototyping. But simply because the statement “Ruby is incredibly slow but I don’t care because my database is slower” will no longer be true.
What he’s missing here is the real reason people use frameworks like Rails; it’s not about it being Ruby, or being the latest cool thing – it’s about developer productivity. That’s it, and that’s all there is to it – Rails allows a developer to do more in less time. That’s one of the key reasons so many Java web developers jumped ship (though I can think of a few others), and what pushed Microsoft to invest so heavily in their MVC framework.
I could fully rehash the argument, but in what I consider to be one of Jeff Atwood’s best articles, Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive, he covers a key point to my argument – developer time is vastly more expensive than hardware. Atwood’s take on the issue is clear:
Clearly, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Whenever you’re provided an opportunity to leverage that imbalance, it would be incredibly foolish not to.
When there’s a choice between developer productivity, and spending money on hardware – the conclusion should be the same. It’s much cheaper to throw more hardware at a slower framework than it is to invest more developer time in a faster framework. For any non-trivial application, throwing more front-end servers at it will always be cheaper than slowing the development process down with a non-productivity-centric toolkit.
It’s simple economics; server hardware is getting faster and cheaper, developer time is only getting more expensive.
