Comments on: Frederick Brooks / Ruby on Rails smackdown http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/2005/08/25/frederick-brooks-ruby-on-rails-smackdown/ A little bit technology, a little bit rock-n-roll Mon, 31 May 2010 00:50:56 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Bozo the Clown http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/2005/08/25/frederick-brooks-ruby-on-rails-smackdown/comment-page-1/#comment-232867 Bozo the Clown Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:27:37 +0000 http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/?p=18#comment-232867 I think Brooks' idea was that there was no single tool that would improve general programming productivity by an order of magnitude (~10x). But in a specialized area, you can certainly improve productivity 10x or more by replacing stupidly inappropriate key development tools with a more appropriate one. Say, for a specific web development project replace Fortran and winsock with Ruby and Rails, if those latter tools are much better for the particular project. But this is still very dependent on your special situation -- it is not a *general* improvement, it is a special-case improvement. I think Brooks’ idea was that there was no single tool that would improve general programming productivity by an order of magnitude (~10x).

But in a specialized area, you can certainly improve productivity 10x or more by replacing stupidly inappropriate key development tools with a more appropriate one. Say, for a specific web development project replace Fortran and winsock with Ruby and Rails, if those latter tools are much better for the particular project.

But this is still very dependent on your special situation — it is not a *general* improvement, it is a special-case improvement.

]]> By: Mark Ramm http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/2005/08/25/frederick-brooks-ruby-on-rails-smackdown/comment-page-1/#comment-144 Mark Ramm Wed, 19 Oct 2005 19:30:13 +0000 http://www.chaddickerson.com/blog/?p=18#comment-144 I just posted a piece on my blog about Fred Brooks , and Ruby on Rails. http://compoundthinking.blogspot.com/2005/10/silver-bullet-on-rails.html My take on it is that Rails certianly does make you more productive, and when you combine it with other things like itterative development, small teams to reduce communicaiton overhead, and unit testing, you are very likely to find a 10x increase in productivity. --Mark Ramm I just posted a piece on my blog about Fred Brooks , and Ruby on Rails.

http://compoundthinking.blogspot.com/2005/10/silver-bullet-on-rails.html

My take on it is that Rails certianly does make you more productive, and when you combine it with other things like itterative development, small teams to reduce communicaiton overhead, and unit testing, you are very likely to find a 10x increase in productivity.

–Mark Ramm

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