Here at 82ASK, we’ve been using Ruby on Rails for well over a year, and we love it. We switched to Rails because we believed that we would see dramatically better productivity, and (in the main) that’s how things have turned out.
Something’s been bothering me about this though. Back in 1986, Fred Brooks wrote his brilliant paper No Silver Bullet (included in the Anniversary Edition of The Mythical Man Month). It was, and remains, one of the most influential papers ever written about software engineering. In it he argues that there will be no more techniques or practices that will serve as “silver bullets” and massively improve programmer productivity.
So, how do we square this circle? Was Brooks wrong? Has David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) uncovered something that invalidates his argument? Or are we fooling ourselves, and Rails isn’t really giving us the kind of productivity boost we think it is?
