To be truly fair to Bram, he had the insight to take an existing marginally working p2p system that he had previously been employed to develop and strip it down to the essential components needed to shift bits quickly. Innovation, not invention.
I definitely agree with you on Napster. I am less sure about RoR. It was a a very nice improvement over existing systems, but how much of that was DHH genius and how much was simply due to Ruby providing a better platform upon which to build this particular framework I do not know. It was definitely better than existing alternatives in other scripting languages, but I was not a part of the Ruby world at the time and have no idea where the initial RoR work fit in to the whole Ruby ecosystem at the time.
Well, you can write fortran in Ruby, but it took DHH to show where it does shine. It is easy to underestimate the initial insight in hindsight "oh, that's obvious", but it only becomes obvious when someone does it.
And does not definition of geniality has something on having that insight for the "obvious"?
Others had shown were it shines as well; there was Nitro, IOWA, a few other apps that were solid examples of Ruby qua Ruby at the same time as (or prior to) Rails.
Why do some people/code get attention and accolades, while others, equally deserving, do not? Timing? Personality? Bluster?
I definitely agree with you on Napster. I am less sure about RoR. It was a a very nice improvement over existing systems, but how much of that was DHH genius and how much was simply due to Ruby providing a better platform upon which to build this particular framework I do not know. It was definitely better than existing alternatives in other scripting languages, but I was not a part of the Ruby world at the time and have no idea where the initial RoR work fit in to the whole Ruby ecosystem at the time.