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Posted:

> Wednesday, February 15, 2006

The article is more than three years old, and much of it appears to no longer be relevant.
Gah! Why didn't you post your comment earlier?!
As a trivial example, the entire first point he makes is basically no longer accurate.

Rails does allow you to do joins, and eager loads of associations. It also allows you to override the default expected foreign-key names, etc, for declared association. The only feature missing is that rails will not automatically infer associations, which I'm not sure is a "bad" thing.

Joel never could differentiate "free as in beer" from "free as in speech". He wants to get paid for using free (both as beer and speech) software but doesn't like paying for the books people wrote. He has the source, sees limitations he doesn't like but it doesn't cross his mind to offer patches (to things that eventually got patched).

Why do we still listen to him?

Why did we listen in 2006?

This wasn't written by Joel, it's a post from 2006 by "a Hack".
Yeah, none of this is really pertinent anymore. It was actually fairly ignorant at the time, except for the documentation part, which has been fixed.

But, hey, it got someone some upvotes, right? That's all that really matters.

This is an example of why we need to (1) get a better dupe checking system (I'm pretty sure this article's been posted before) and (2) display the fully qualified host name with the article titles (the submission looks as if it's an official Joel post because it doesn't show that it originates from discuss.joelonsoftware.com).

I haven't touched Lisp since college, otherwise I'd dig into the source code and submit a patch.

In my opinion just adding subdomains to the source bar would be enough. Another common one is code.google.com coming up as google.com.