You're Doing it Wrong

So first thing I do is check my RSS reader and, lo and behold, there's another great post over at Coding Horror.  In it, Jeff is talking about Twitter, one of the largest websites employing Ruby on Rails.

Ruby_on_Rails is an OSS framework used to create websites. Kinda like ASP.NET, but without the uncool MS funk. Its growing fast; it probably has the biggest fanboy following of all open source web frameworks out there now.

Anyhow, Jeff was posting about how the Twitter team is suffering under the load of their success and the failure of Ruby to scale gracefully under load. If you're interested in that, then check out Jeff's post. This one isn't about that.

[firinmycsharp.l]I've taken a look at Ruby. Even done a little sample online, coding a simple "hello world" web app. Its an okay language from that standpoint. Some of the base functionality is marred by ...nonsense... Like method names. Some people think that brevity is the soul of whit. I tend to agree. But when it comes to programming, brevity is the soul of unmantainability. For instance, Rail's method of writing out the current state of an object to string is called "to_s()". Short; definitely shorter to .NET's "ToString()". But is that a good thing? What if all your object's methods are named like this? "to_x" "to_a" "to_fu"... A method's name imparts meaning to the programmer. And with intellisense, it almost never takes more than four keystrokes to find your method. Hell, with 3.0's extension methods, I could even create the same thing in .NET

public string to_s(this) { return this.ToString(); }

But, still, this post isn't about Ruby's "syntactic sugar", or even how its execution time relative to C++ is over 100:1 (c#'s is 1:1).

This post is about Twitter. From the website:

A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

Ahem...

WHAT THE FUCK!

What the FUCKING FUCK is that?? A website... where people simply post what they are currently doing... and it gets over 11,000 pageviews a second??? Holy FUCK. Seriously, FUCK. There are some sick people on the internet, but this takes the cake. Sick, sick sick. Seriously sick. Extremely sick. It takes a mind warped by years of perversion to think the idea up in the first place, let alone to actually use it. Holy mother of fuck, I gotta get back to work. this internet thing is definitely bad for the soul.