It shouldn't be this easy ⇝

Keith Gaddis in a thoughtful take on Steve Klabnik's provocative piece on Rails' shortcomings:

This is mostly my opinion, but a lot of us let our rejection of enterprise culture lead to rejection of “enterprisey” design patterns, many of which developed in order to solve problems we’re now encountering in the Rails world as we tackle problem domains that are not only non-trivial but exceedingly complex.

Perhaps we in the Rails community have been too quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but it was a knee-jerk reaction to over-architecture, not a rejection of Enterprise culture. When I came to Rails, Microsoft was telling us we needed six layers of indirection between the UI and the database. ActiveRecord was a common sense approach that fit nicely for eighty percent of web apps. I think it still does. For the twenty percent of apps with more complexity, there's a host of Rails plugins and a vibrant Ruby ecosystem beyond Rails.

If there’s one overriding idea from the Rails world that I think should be promoted far and wide, its this: it shouldn’t be this hard.

That's the drive behind all innovation, isn't it? I just hope in the quest to improve, we don't lose sight of the big picture. There has never been a better time to be a developer, web or otherwise. We indeed have an embarassment of riches. Development will always be hard. But it shouldn't be this easy.