I don't think it was implied at all, especially since he recommended using it at the end. It's implied only if you read the title and nothing more.

What was both implied and directly stated was that a cloud-based architecture is often not the best idea for a lot of people, despite the modern mania for it.

Phil specifically addresses the idea that he is dissing RoR in a comment.(emphasis mine)

"Angry Rails Enthusiasts Whose Comments I Deleted: A lot of the comments were of the form “Your assertion that it is impossible to build a responsive Web site with Ruby on Rails is wrong. Rails is in fact great if programmed by a great mind like my own.”

The problem with this kind of comment is that I never asserted that Ruby on Rails could not be used effectively by some programmers.

The point of the story was to show that the MIT-trained programmer with 20 years experience and an enthusiasm for the latest and greatest ended up building something that underperformed something put together by people without official CS training who apparently invested zero time in exploring optimal tools.

Could some team of Rails experts have done a better job with mitgenius.com? Obviously they could have! But in the 2+ years that our MIT graduate worked on this site, he apparently did not converge on an acceptable solution.

My enthusiasm for this story has nothing to do with bashing Ruby or Rails. I like this story because (1) it shows the fallacy of credentialism; a undergrad degree in CS is proof of nothing except that someone sat in a chair for four years (see http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2007/08/23/improving-unde... for my thoughts on how we could change the situation), (2) it shows what happens when a programmer thinks that he is so smart he doesn’t need to draft design documents and have them reviewed by others before proceeding (presumably another set of eyes would have noticed the mismatch between data set size and RAM), (3) it shows that fancy new tools cannot substitute for skimping on 200-year-old engineering practices and 40-year-old database programming practices, and (4) it shows the continued unwillingness of experienced procedural language programmers to learn SQL and a modicum of RDBMS design and administration, despite the fact that the RDBMS has been at the heart of many of society’s most important IT systems for at least two decades."

That is exactly what I understood from the article.

I don't see any rails bashing in the original article and you would have to cherry pick phrases to get that idea. I read the HN comments first and thought phil had gone off on a rant against RoR t judge from some comments here.

that will teach me to read HN comments before reading the original article!

It doesn't show any of that because it's all made up. He just slapped together a story that would appeal to someone like you based on your preconceptions, but there is no actual argument. The whole thing could be reduced to "idiots can't write software" and it would lose no substance.

Even some of these points that are supposed common sense engineering wisdom are specious. Do you need to draft design documents to build a workable product? Of course not! Is the first thing you should do when you start a new website to buy $20k worth of hardware? No! Do you need enough RAM to hold your entire database? Maybe it's the best optimization you can do, but it's far from a foregone conclusion.

Why I am I so vitriolic? Because the article is not truthy. The quote above says "MIT-trained" in the same sentence as "without official CS training." Uh, it doesn't get much more official than MIT. Suggesting that a programmer with 20 years experience couldn't get a single web page to load faster than 5 minutes is a flight of fancy plain and simple.

I might as well write a long-winded story about how Microsoft hired a Chimpanzee to program the next version of Word, and failed, therefore mammals make terrible programmers and furthermore decided to use C based on ill-informed simian whimsy.

Critical reading skills here are a lot lower than you'd think, especially for comments with dozens of upvotes.

I think he only reason it's still in there at the end is just so the site doesn't have to be rewritten. He's just changing the hardware to something beefier instead of optimizing it.

It's sad that rails, by default though it may not be the case anymore, makes n+c requests to the database when you load a page that lists n objects. It can be fixed in one line of code per page.

"Using Rails doesn't prove your smarts" was more clearly stated.

Using something that's good and not trendy suggests intelligence. Using something that's good and trendy does not suggest anything meaningful.

Well actually that's not true. You use the best tools for the job. Front end can be done in PHP/Ruby/Django quickly while the entire back-end can be written in java or lisp. It all depends on what you need and what is the fastest, most scalable way to accomplish it.

That is true intelligence.

In my eyes Good and Trendy vs Good and Not Trendy is irrelevant. They are both good, so solve the problem.

Oh and "rails does not prove your smarts" should be: "Using technology X does not prove your smarts." because there will always be another X. Today its Rails, tomorrow its Open Sails, and the day after we all go back to Lisp.

My point, put more directly is that using something good only because it's good suggests intelligence.

My previous post only applies to the perspective of an outside observer who must guess at the reasons for a given technology choice.