... the bottom line is that there are three and a half platforms (C#, Java, PHP, and a half Python) that are all equally likely to make you successful, an infinity of platforms where you're pretty much guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything (Lisp, ISAPI DLLs written in C, Perl), and a handful of platforms where The Jury Is Not In, So Why Take The Risk When Your Job Is On The Line? (Ruby on Rails). —Joel Spolsky

Spolsky's advice exactly matches my experience. The platform I've spent the most time in over the last five years, OpenACS, falls somewhere between "guaranteed to fail spectacularly when it's too late to change anything" and also-ran. I tried Ruby on Rails, and my personal jury is in: it's an arrogant language by arrogant people: the opening music for the Ruby on Rails podcast is Building a Religion; David Heinemeier Hannson's response to Spolsky's post is a defensive broadside rather than a serious reply. Spolsky writes with a forcefulness that can come off as arrogance, but I don't think it actually is. Consider this piece on marketing:

We have lots of FogBugz customers who have high-priced Remedy, Rational, or Mercury products sitting on the shelves after investments of well over $100,000, because that software isn't good enough to actually use. Then they buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of FogBugz and that's the product they really use. The Rational salesperson is laughing at me, because I have $2000 in the bank and he has $100,000. But I have far more customers than he does, and they're all using my product, and evangelizing it, and spreading it, while Rational customers either (a) don't use it or (b) use it and can't stand it. But he's still laughing at me from his 40 foot yacht while I play with rubber duckies in the bathtub.

...

The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know.

I've been nattering on about this topic for well over 5000 words and I don't really feel like we're getting anywhere, you and I.

Some days it seems like it would be easier to be a taxi driver, with prices set by law. Or to be selling sugar. Plain ol' sugar. Yep. That would be sweet.

Take my advice, offered about 20 pages back: charge $0.05 for your software. Unless it does bug tracking, in which case the correct price is $30,000,000. Thank you for your time, and I apologize for leaving you even less able to price software than you were when you started reading this.

Many programmers exhibit tribalism: they identify with the specific technologies that they use, and criticism of the technology becomes a personal attack, which is therefore Manichaean, and therefore completely wrong, and therefore deserving of retaliation in kind. These instincts are seductively comfortable, but they do the industry a disservice. Spolsky puts his arguments forward strongly, but he doesn't seem to wear Manichaean blinders. DHH, and Ruby on Rails and its followers, do seem more partisan and more close-minded.

"I'm really excited about Dungeon Siege, the Uwe Boll movie you're in."