Guest post: More on distractions, from Paul Ford:

The Amish don�t drive cars. My �car,� with regards to programming the new Harper�s Magazine website, would be something like Ruby on Rails. When I see something like Ruby on Rails I get very excited and think, �Wow! I�ll be able to learn a whole new set of skills, and I�ll spend hours hacking away, creating new problems to solve. Come on AJAX! Come on dynamic database objects!� But I have this big set of problems I�m already trying to solve, and I have the skills to solve them, and a roadmap already written. A few months ago I spent several days dabbling with Ruby on Rails, wondering if I should ditch Java for the Rails framework, until I realized that it was just another broad distraction posing as a narrow distraction. Not to say it�s not a great advance, but in my life switching over to Rails would create more problems than it would solve. It would disrupt the close connection I feel with the Java code I�ve already written. I decided that I would lose more than I�d gain.

(Via 43 Folders.)