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by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Original Post: Boy, is James McGovern enterprise or what!
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Allow me to summarize a few choice bits from McGovern's incomprehensibly convoluted ranting. You may not have the patience to finish through his tirade:
Productivity doesn't matter any more (8), but even if it did, there's no way Ruby could deliver more of it because sales people have used the word productivity to lie to me in the past (11).
Whatever we're doing now is already the right thing (2) until the big consulting firms tell us that something else is the right thing (3). And they're not going to tell us about Ruby because they can't make money off it (7).
None of my fellow Enterprise Architects talk about Ruby (5) because they're too busy to think about their business to worry about new technology (4).
All magazines that write about Ruby are bad (4) and all books written about Ruby are bad (1). If other people say they're good, it's because they were paid to say that (12).
James McGovern is an Enterprise Architect, a self-proclaimed "industry thought leader" with a blog entitled "Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership". And as if that wasn't enough enterprise for you, McGovern has also written Java Web Services Architecture, A Practical Guide to Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures. Oh, and he's a member of the Worldwide Institute of Software Architects.
So by Enterprise, Architect, and Enterprise Architect standards, this gent must be the top of the pop. Thus, allow me to make this perfectly clear: I would be as happy as a clam never to write a single line of software that guys like James McGovern found worthy of The Enterprise.
If Ruby, Rails, and the rest of the dynamic gang we're lumped together to represent, is not now, nor ever, McGovern Enterprise Ready™, I say hallelujah! Heck, I'll repeat that in slow motion just to underscore my excitement: HAL-LE-LU-JAH!
With that out of the way, we're faced with a more serious problem. How do we fork the word enterprise? The capitalized version has obviously been hijacked by McGovern and his like-minded to mean something that is synonymous with hurt and pain and torment.
I refuse to surrender to the notion that only software exhibiting those attributes are present in big business. I know there are pockets of resistance hiding in there. We can't just abandon these people to the mercy of Enterprise Architects like McGovern. But we need a word to describe the work and the problems they're facing, which isn't overloaded and distorted beyond repair like 'enterprise' is.
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