If you find the article interesting, I urge you to avoid the looming traps of debating whether Rails is slow, whether Rails is bloated, or whether rewriting Rails was one of the Things You Should Never Do. Spring adroitly out of the maw of the monster known as debating the proposition “Node callbacks considered harmful.” If you want to find the treasure, you can’t spend all your time with traps and monsters.

Giles makes s a habit of scattering nerd-traps in his essays, and I have a theory about that. Harlan Ellison, author of A Boy and His Dog, does not suffer fools kindly (that phrase is not a compliment). In the story, the characters of Vic and Blood are, respectively, a young man and a telepathic dog. Hollywood picked up on the story, and from time to time producers and other low-lifes would arrange a meeting with Harlan to discuss their ideas for making the story into a film.

Invariably, the subject would turn to how Blood would talk to Vic. Producer after producer would come up with variations on animating the dog’s talking mouth, and Harlan would try to explain to them that the dog is telepathic, and the telepathic bond between Vic and Blood is central to the story. The producers would stare at him blankly, then try to “educate” Harlan about the American movie-goer. These meetings would end badly, and after a while Harlan stopped entertaining movie ideas.

One day Harlan got a call from L.Q.Jones about “A Boy and His Dog.” L.Q. was a big fan of Harlan’s work and he had some really big ideas—

Harlan interrupted him. “How,” Harlan asked politely over the telephone, “Do you intend to animate the dog’s mouth when he talks?” There was a long pause. L.Q. seemed confused. “What do you mean? Blood’s telepathic. That’s the key to the bond between Blood and Vic! If he can just talk to anybody, there’s no story!” Harlan had finally met someone he could work with, and they made a fun, albeit macabre film.

Anyhow, my theory about Giles’ writing is that he wraps his key idea in layers of link-bait and nerd-traps, shallow but emotionally charged ideas that side-track all but the strongest minds. I think he does this so that when he’s scanning Twitter or HN comments or whatever, he can quickly filter out the folks he doesn’t want to talk to, just as Harlan deliberately asked L.Q. how he planned to animate Blood’s mouth. If there’s a thread twelve comments deep about whether the new version of bundler solves such-and-such a problem, Giles knows he can ignore the whole thing as being incidental to what he was trying to say.

So now, when I read a post from Giles, I pretty much ignore the first four or five outrageous ideas he cooks up before breakfast. Maybe Rails 3.2 is faster than 2.x. Maybe not. Who cares, that can’t be the kernel of the rant, I move along. Where, I want to know, is the good idea that doesn’t need to be presented as an inflammatory diatribe?

The treasure, as is often the case in his essays, is right out in the open. Once you decide to ignore everything inflammatory, the insight is as plain as the nose on your face:

People decry the degree to which tech is a fashion-driven industry, but there's a reason for it. As Smalltalk creator Alan Kay said, "Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture.”

Once you view the post as being about software development culture instead of about software development tools, everything clicks together. This is not a post about Rails and Node, it’s a post about people and culture. It’s not about how Node and CoffeeScript change everything, it’s about how they change nothing, because we haven’t changed. We’re still on a path to re-invent all the ceremony and design patterns and cruft of the last go-around.

Pop culture is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. If you needed a degree to play music, would there be Jazz today? I like Jazz, and I especially like the role it played in building bridges across America’s colour divide. It’s hard to hate someone for the colour of their skin when the music they make is touching your heart. It’s hard to maintain the fiction that people of different colours can’t work side-by-side in an office when you can see them working side-by-side in a band or orchestra.

Jazz helped change people and helped change culture. Did Rails change people? Did Rails change software development culture? Could Node change people? If it were to change software development culture, how would it do so?

These are the big questions, the important questions Giles’ rant provokes.