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So the Rails Maturity Model is reality.

I hate it.

I hate the actual concept of the Rails Maturity Model.

I hate it so much it’s making me think it’s time to start moving on from Rails and Ruby. Which is probably a slight over-reaction on my part, but anyway.

At best I think RMM is a marketing exercise for certain Rails consultancies.

At worst it fosters a myopic vision of Best Practice founded in the worst kind of Group Think.

As Yehuda Katz posted:

It makes perfect sense to create a forum for sharing and aggregating the practices that people are finding useful at the moment. What makes less sense is creating a ranked list of “popular” practices, with no obvious mechanism for mediating differences except pure popularity. And even worse is ranking firms by their aggregate level of conformance.
(see Incentivizing Innovation for more).

This is really the at the heart of the  problem. It’s not that we’re against a forum for sharing practice and process, but the moment we start rating and ranking organisations we are engaging in the worst kind of group think that many of us are trying desperately to avoid.

If I wanted this sort of Best Practice, I would have stayed in the Java world …

What happens when you disagree with a number of the current  practices that are make up the RMM?

What happens in the case where you have a different development philosophy?

There is no capacity for dissent in the current vision of RMM.

Full disclosure – I really saw red when I saw one of the RMM practices is “Haml for templates”. Genshi is beautiful. ERB is adequate. Haml is clumsy, brutal, ugly, wrong and demonstrably fucked.