What's the worst-case scenario? Well, I used to have this friend who worked at a tech company we'll call "FooCorp". This is a true story: at FooCorp, the HR department decided to hire a lone cowboy programmer to write a new performance-evaluation tool for the company. The programmer they hired—who had no interaction with the rest of engineering—went ahead and decided to write it in Ruby. With much ado and fanfare, they rolled it out, and with even more ado, a thousand people spent hours entering in their performance reviews. And then, with a truly enormous amount of ado—I mean enough ado to fill several football stadiums—the shiny new Ruby-based perf tool went on a rampage and ate up everyone's performance reviews. Forever.
Was that Ruby's fault? Of course not. In fact I, er, that is, my friend met with the cowboy afterwards to figure out whether the disaster could be undone, and the cowboy announced: “WELL, YOU KNOW, WHEN THE SYSTEM GETS ENUFF CHAOS GOIN' IN THERE, PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING COULD GO WRONG.” And I can't say he was wrong, either.
Needless to say, Ruby got a bad rap at FooCorp for a little while.
Sorry. I just liked the story.
Posted by ronlusk at May 12, 2006 04:41 PM