The post in question is an essay about the dangers of hype and how one would be better served by "turning one's focus to the principles and techniques of software development, which transcend any technology fashion". He goes one to say "Your time and energy is better invested in improving your abilities and skills than in adding another notch to your technology belt." The problem with these assertions are that they assume that learning the new technology neither offers new insight into the 'principles or techniques of software development' nor would 'improve your ability and skill'.

In the post Mr. Ed uses Ajax, Ruby and Rails as his primary examples of over hyped technologies to be avoided. I'm not an Ajax guy so I can't talk about it but I've been a Ruby fan for a long time and have been playing with Rails for the last year; and while I don't think I qualify as what he refers to as a 'fan boy' I have certainly enjoyed working with and learning from both technologies.

Now, I can't guarantee you would have the same learning experience I had learning Ruby and Rails, because your background may include exposure to previous technologies that I never learned (and this would be true whether the technology was hyped or not), but I'm willing to bet you would learn a lot of new things, especially if you've not already ventured into the world of scripting languages and their web frameworks. To be a bit more concrete, if you come from a C, C++, Java, C# background, you will learn new ideas about control flow, abstraction, modularity, loose coupling and information hiding - all very core principles of software engineering.

It's certainly true that people look to these new technologies as if they are the silver bullet that will slay their wooly coding problems. And I agree with Mr. Ed that that they certainly are not. But again, just because a technology can't live up to it's over the top hype doesn’t mean it doesn't have real value.

As a final point, I'd like to take issue with the posts over simplification of Rails as just an ORM library for Ruby. While it's true that the Rails ORM layer, Active Record, is a powerful and important part of Rails, it's certainly not the only thing the framework offers. What bothers me most is Mr. Ed was both ignorant of this fact and using something as an example that he didn't know enough about or he was purposely distorting the facts for dramatic effect. I suspect the latter and am disappointed because I had come to expect more.