David: putting words in my mouth

In the comments of my last post, David said:

“It’s great to see that you’re warming up to the importance of productivity.”

Wait one second — I never said I was “warning up” to it, nor even implied to it I have been “cool” on it in the past. In fact, productivity has always been the critical factor in everything I do in business, whether it be selecting a language, hiring choices, or development methodologies.

My post never claimed that Ruby is more productive, overall, than using Java. What I acknowledge is that Ruby is more productive for creating some applications, but that Java is more productive for maintaining most applications. And in my job role I maintain software much more than I create it, so Ruby is still not even an option.

Please don’t selectively read my post and think that I have “changed my mind” or came to some grand realization that parts of Java weren’t as productive as I thought they were. I started my career as a perl and PHP developer, and throughout my career I’ve always looked for tools (from JDE on Emacs, to IDEA, from web frameworks to bug trackers) that make me more productive. Nor do I pretend that Java is the holy grail for productivity, or fool myself that without IDEA that I’d still be using Java today. However, I am not going to pretend that the world operates the way I wish it would, but rather I will work with the world the way it is and do my best to change it for the better. But to think that Rails has changed my thoughts on productivity is, at best, foolish, or at worst, an insult.