From the guy who founded an entire development ecosystem out of the web framework he built on what was, at the time, an obscure Japanese programming language, that he originally built for a project management application, it seems kind of strange that he'd be surprised that someone might build a complex tool in similar circumstances.
In a parallel world where the cool developers were all attending Wasabiconf, Joel Spolsky Prime wrote a sneering blogpost assuming that DHH Prime was joking about the crazy 'scaffolding' and 'proprietary database mapping' framework he was building BaseCamp on
I would like to remind you that we are talking about Ruby vs essentially VBScript. I mean, I pretty much hated the Ruby hype and especially the attempts to make it seem better than it really was, but we are indeed talking here about web software written in VBScript that ran only on Windows. For many people working with web tech today, that is inconcievable. Not that it didn't have its fair share of detractors back then...
Hats off to FogCreek for building a successful product, but that doesn't mean that people have to admire or even accept their technical choices without any criticism. I for one consider DHH's criticism to be on mark.
In a parallel world where the cool developers were all attending Wasabiconf, Joel Spolsky Prime wrote a sneering blogpost assuming that DHH Prime was joking about the crazy 'scaffolding' and 'proprietary database mapping' framework he was building BaseCamp on