Note that in the same vein as Pele, Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, Joel has reach that Brazillian Soccer player level of stardom in the geek community and can pretty much go by just his first name. Admit it, you knew who I was referring to in the title. Admit it! Please indulge me in a brief moment of hubris. I was reading part 1 of Joel Spolsky’s talk at Yale that he gave on November 28 and came upon this quote on code provability... The problem, here, is very fundamental. In order to...
Of course that assumes that Joel wears a size 9 and a half. Once again the Joel Cycle takes another turn. The cycle goes something like this: Joel critiques something or other. Bloggers counter Joel’s claims, many with thoughtful counter arguments. Soon a flood of comments and posts start to turn a bit ugly and form around two camps: The Joel is an idiot why do you even read him? camp and the Joel is successful, what have you ever done that you can disagree with him? camp. Rinse and Repeat It really is an interesting phenomenon to watch...
Joel Spolsky follows up on his earlier remarks about scaling out a Ruby on Rails site with this post on Ruby performance. I’m afraid it is a thoroughly unconvincing and surprising argument. He states... I understand the philosophy that developer cycles are more important than cpu cycles, but frankly that’s just a bumper-sticker slogan and not fair to the people who are complaining about performance. A bumper-sticker slogan? That’s a surprising statement considering that FogBugz is not written entirely in C. Is it because Wasabi compiled to PHP or VBScript is saving CPU cycles? Hardly. As one might...