Anyway, I certainly see your point about the pundit-like nature of the original poster. I would hope that most folks would get what an extreme view he has from his suggestion of firing folks that are not “smart enough”.

On the whole I prefer, obviously, more balanced commentary from open minded enthusiasts who are more interested in how cross pollination can improve the entire ecology rather than in having a monoculture with all its inherent problems and dangers.

Looking at the site, I find it interesting. Podcasts are hard to comment on aren’t they? I have quite the subscription list, but even places where I would want to send feedback on, I rarely do because I am usually listening to a podcast while AFK.

At any rate, yeah. In all fairness to the Ruby, his blog post isn’t really representative of reasonably minded people, but kind of like a Sean Hannity quote, it sums up what seems to be the argument of a particular viewpoint. I don’t know if it is really vi vs emacs (though all sane people know emacs rules all :P). It really seems to me like people have an unrealistic expectation from Ruby as “the next big thing.” At the end of the day, the Ruby evangelism seems akin to saying that “bash scripting is the end all be all.” Everything has its place, and there are some places where loose scripting is better, because you can get the easy stuff done faster. There are, however, points at which that breaks down.

You are right about intentionality. It isn’t really about typing, but I think this goes to part of the problem with the Ruby evangelism right now: Ruby doesn’t live in the “enterprise.” When you are dealing with large IT organization, API exposure and sharing code across teams is critical do “doing it well.” I can’t recall who said it (Zawodny?), but the thing with Ruby is “it works great if you have an all star team that cares”. I think that is really true — and I think this was the point pat was riffing on — but you also have to have a codebase that is pretty much confined to that one team. When you have 150 developers in 20 teams in a big company, intentionality becomes critical. Code is communication between teams in this case, and if the code is less than clear, you are hurting the company. You can’t just “fire” someone outside your group because they don’t “get” what you are doing.