Brian DeLacy, who runs a Ruby on Rails interest group in Cambridge, MA, sent me an email that I thought was worth sharing more widely. He wrote:
It seems to me that we’re seeing a paradigm shift in programming, embodied in the Rails phenomenon. Is this what you’re seeing? (I’ve borrowed from your format of Web 2.0):
While I’m not sure that Brian is right about everything on his list — for example, you can build cool apps as quickly with new Java frameworks like Spring as you can with Ruby on Rails — he’s definitely right that programming has changed radically in the last decade. As a matter of fact, I began the thinking that led me to formulate the ideas of Web 2.0 in trying to come to grips with the changes in programming that I first saw in the rise of scripting languages. I was struck by the contrast between the lack of respect many traditional software engineers had for Perl and its widespread use as “the duct tape of the internet.” (I wrote about that in a 1998 essay entitled The Importance of Perl, as well as in Hardware, Software, and Infoware.)
I think Brian’s got a thought-provoking list here. What would you add? What would you argue with?