Judging a book by it's "sucks" result

A friend of mine asked me recently to go in on a little venture of his in the gaming industry. Unable to say "no" to what I believe is a fantastic idea, I went along with it...

Now there was another guy involved (technologically speaking) who wrote something that was a working prototype (awesome). It came down to a little discussion as to what WE should use for the front-end and storage mechanisms.

Well, having deployed a few real life applications in Ruby and having success with them, I only felt the need to display my affection and trust that I had with it and it's frameworks (yes, both Rails and Merb).

The problem I had wasn't that the guy wanted to use Python/Pylons or something in that realm. It was the argument. In fact, now that I've heard it a few times I can almost pinpoint exactly where the debate material is coming from. And that my friends, is simply fantastic. We're still not going along with the right tool for the right job, we're still shooting from the hip with what "we like".

Uh, but Brad, you just said you liked Ruby? You're right, I did. But given the requirements I was handed and based on past experiences it appeared to be the right tool for the right job.

I'm open to using new things - if I wasn't why would I ever give things like CouchDB and Erlang the time of day? They're sitting right on the edge of the programming paradigm shift from what most coders/programmers/developers are use to and it fascinates me.

Back to it.

I'm fine with using Python or whatever for a web interface. One more (hopefully) successful notch in my belt and slap proudly on a resume. But it just absolutely kills me when the keys of an argument are literally plucked from simply searching Google for "why sucks". What's even worse is when it's a predominantly blog rifling .

Please, please, please, I'm begging you the reader of this blog post; the rule here is simple, I'll even wrap it in a blockquote for you to save and tattoo across your chest in a Tupac-ish style:

Research first, execute later.

It's not the other way around, in fact, if you do it the other way around you're going to do your research the hard way; rewriting it in the layers you should have used in the first place.