A couple of days ago I read this post.

While I love to rant about magpie developers as much as the next girl I found myself in disagreement with both @wob and @codinghorror.

New shiny things

Yes, there’s a new JavaScript framework born every week and yes it becomes obsolete by the time the initial commit is pushed on Github. And yes it’s hard to keep up with the endless stream of everchanging tools and libraries. But let me ask you this - how else we can advance our tools?

Here’s a picture of a giraffe’s laryngeal nerve.

Dawkins made it famous by using it as an argument against intelligent design but we’re not going into this debate.

The reason this nerve takes a 5 metre detour for what should’ve been a 5cm trip is that evolution is not a straight road to the most effective solution.

It would be great if we could jump straight into the most time-efficient and easy-to-learn tool to build “credit card authorization […] and […] inventory reports to print” but unfortunately we can’t. Unfortunately it takes a lot of trial and error and shitty package managers and over-engineered processes to get there.

Fighting off hipsters

The best thing about this is you don’t even have to do it yourself! There’s a community of overly-enthusiastic magpie developers who will develop, adopt, burn themselves on and perfect those tools you can begrudgingly agree to use a couple of years later. All you have to do is shut down some junior’s enthusiasm every once in a while.

I’ve used Rails and Ruby in my everyday developer life for over 4 years now. And even though I have regular fits of anger and despair caused by those two I’m grateful to all the early adopters who made it possible for me not to touch PHP or Java to write web apps. And as a way to pay it forward I can promise I will keep trying to sneak things like Lotus and Elm into production against everyone’s best judgement.