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Ignorance is bliss

22 Jan 2005 by Jason Fried

Geert Bevin says that Ta-da List is “so stupid” and that Basecamp is “a total fraud” that would only take “weeks to write.” Think what you will about our products, Geert, but you might want to zip up your fly, your ignorance is showing. Or is that jealousy? It’s so hard to tell sometimes.

To quote Taxi Driver Wisdom, “If youre a smart person, you can see whats smart about the next guy. If youre secretly afraid youre a moron, okay, then to you everybodys a moron.” Geert, what are you so afraid of that you need to call a product that a lot of people find really useful a fraud?

There’s more on this at David’s blog. BTW: All this started because of an O’Reilly tutorial on Ruby on Rails that was then picked up by Slashdot. And, well, you know what happens when that happens.

2 comments so far (Post a Comment)

22 Jan 2005 | Pedro - Brazil said...

I understand Bevin. He thinks applications must have at least 1k lines of code, useless personalization and all that bullshit that makes you waste time instead of doing your things.

Lots of apps are there to fulfill your ideal, Bevin. Go after them and let we use our stupid things.

23 Jan 2005 | Michal Migurski said...

I've been paying attention to RoR for the past few months too, but the gee-whizerry of the setup evangelism and conflation of Basecamp's quality with the RoR's leaves me a little cold. Whoosh, bang, you have a web application! It's _never_ that easy.

Childish insults aside, Geert does bring up two excellent points about web apps that are being glossed over here: maintainability beats speed-of-development in the long run, and letting your database schema drive your object model can lead to problems.

I have intense respect for what you guys do going back to enormicom, but you're doing the conversation a disservice by pretending that Geert is just trolling. If you're going to link to his article, please try to address the actual points he makes.

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