Master: “Hmmm. The argument on programmer productivity seems to be lost..”
Apprentice: “It’s game over, man. Just game over! What the fuck are we gonna do now?!”
Master: “You are mistaken, young one. There is always the ace: claim it can’t scale!”

Matt Raible caught the glimpse of a good headline and ran with it: Rails is 8 times slower than Spring+Hibernate. The honorable source of this “fact” comes from “rix” — a commenter on one of Dion’s post (ironically enough railing on this kind of silliness). He has done “extensive performance testing”, but of course doesn’t care to reveal his method, the apps compared, or the hardware setup used.

With this he concludes that Rails isn’t deserving of its attention and that he would rather develop with “…deployment descriptors! And verbose crap. And repetition.” Hehe. I don’t know where to start. Or even if I should. Perhaps other than to say that whenever Microsoft attempts to pull meaningless FUD like this, we call them on it.

Do note that I don’t doubt Java to be faster, I’m objecting to the silliness of publicizing and promoting figures with no context and to draw conclusions from these figures