peterwright.blogspot.com — Peter Wright, an accomplished author who has been writing about Microsoft technologies since Visual Basic 3 (including some best selling Visual Basic books), recently decided to drop Microsoft completely and switch to Macintosh and Ruby on Rails. In this blog posts he details the circumstances that led to his decision.
Sep 12, 2006 View in Crawl 4
geriborgSep 12, 2006
This is just nasty, hate-filled homophobia. Are these kinds of folks MS's defenders, these days?
dossySep 12, 2006
"VB guy switches to RoR."Boy, that sure is telling about RoR, isn't it? RoR is the VB of Web 2.0.
hurfydurfurSep 12, 2006
Yeah, I don't see the whiny bits. His term "day coder" really hits something on the head. There is a lack of passion in the industry that makes all these Apple topics diggable. People _want_ to get excited. People _want_ to stay inspired. Are computers a commodity? Can the PC do everything a Mac can do (basically) and vice-versa? So is it just a luxury difference now? Although I applaud him for being romantic, he might just be switching to a different technology stack with the same natural problem.If I could make it work financially, I'd do the same thing. However we all aren't mature in our careers like he is. The storming out to make a point is kind of a no-no (because the point is never made).He can think Vista is a pile of crap, but it may still be successful because of the previous "whatever, good enough" mentality of the Windows world. And, it may be right.
circlefusionSep 12, 2006
You do know that he has worked with more technology than just VB, right? Someone earlier mentioned that they had a C# book that he wrote.
magadassSep 12, 2006
I feel his opinions, work for Avanade and have been happy so far with getting immersed in technology. But man they sure do have a large sum of idiots employed, but you know I dont mind helping amateur programmers out, what I mean by idiots is by the ones who bulls**t their way through everything pounding their chest the whole way saying "im the best!". They lie, they produce crappy code and its aggrevating and it seems like the Microsoft world is getting worse and worse in this aspect, its not enough for me to ditch Microsoft technologies but it is enough for me to hate working with these people!!
drjones78Sep 12, 2006
Lord, the comments on this post are exceptionally inaccurate and just plain ignorant.Its telling that Rails is a great Web Application Framework (Note: not a web-app), and many of the PHP frameworks have followed suit and attempted to mimic it, to varying levels of success.. symphony, cake, etcSure there have been plenty of web app frameworks before rails, but none have had the elegance or completeness that it enjoys. Its very simple to do simple things, and less complicated to do complex things.The one gotcha with rails seems to be the documentation, but that is getting better. More and more books are coming out on the subject."Also, there is a huge lack of standards out there to support RoR to date." Err.. I would respond to this but I have no idea what it means... it doesn't make any sense. When you say "standards" are you referring to best programming practices (of which there are plenty, and documentation to go with it)?
lazypeonSep 12, 2006
Wait, so a guy who made his fortune and fame from Microsoft is now turning around and defecting to other technologies?That still doesn't change the fact that he made his fortune and fame from Microsoft. The only difference now is that he's gotten enough of a payoff to do what he wants. Good for him, but there is no principle here. He sold out, and then he cashed out. Big deal.If you want to admire programmers, look at the ones who built their careers on principle and stayed there, not the ones who took the easy road to wealth and then bought their way to virtue.
timalmondSep 12, 2006
The "day coders" thing is a stupid insult. I've worked with a lot of "day coders" who I'd gladly hire again.Why? Because they were more interested in getting the requirements correct and delivering code than spending their time chasing what the next cool technology was. Some of the geekiest, and most tech-savvy people at that company delivered far less to the business.Forget tools. The biggest single problem in IT is in requirements definition, specification and communication.Incidentally, I'm not the biggest fan of Microsoft, but I call bulls**t on a lot of these .net vs RoR estimates. If you're knocking up simple CRUD apps, I could see that Rails would have benefits, but most applications are more complicated than that.
Closed AccountDec 31, 2006
<a class="user" href="http://digg.com/apple/Microsoft_Technology_Author_defects_to_Mac_and_Ruby_on_Rails">http://digg.com/apple/Microsoft_Technology_Author_defects_to_Mac_and_Ruby_on_Rails</a>I thought this sounded familiar.