Defending his turf

Slashdot referenced an article by Derek Sivers today: "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails". CmdrTaco managed to turn a case study on a failed project into an opportunity to badmouth Rails.

I didn't see any condemnation of rails in the article (quite the contrary, in fact). It was more of a case study for Joel Spolsky's classic position: don't rewrite from scratch. As Joel puts it:

They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

Instead, Joel advocates doing what Sivers wound up doing: refactor and fix the existing code.

But of course that wouldn't fit CmdrTaco's corporate agenda: to promote LAMP over a growing upstart, as PHP loses market share month after month to the not-very-comparable ASP.Net (mostly encumbered) and the comparable Ruby on Rails (also free). So he passed along the grossly misrepresentative summary of the article and came up with a similarly misleading title. I guess I expected more from CmdrTaco (a.k.a. Rob Malda): he was once an insurgent in the revolution, but he's over thirty now, and therefore not to be trusted.