www-128.ibm.com— Rails isn't a better hammer; it's a different kind of tool. This article explores the compromises and design decisions that went into making Rails so productive within its niche.
May 14, 2006View in Crawl 4
"If a new language dramatically increases your productivity, you weren't a good enough programmer in your previous language to have written or adopted tools or practices that would have made you more productive in the first place." Wow mgainor,You are completely, 100% dead-wrong. Here's a simple thought experiment. Code a basic web application in Assembly, Basic or Cobol. Now do it in Java or C# or even C++. I bet you one of the latter is more productive than the former. If you can accept that there is a productivity difference in just this little thought experiment, than you can see how your statement is highly inaccurate.You *might* be arguing that among high-level languages, the _degree_ to which these languages provide productivity gains is negligible and/or compensated for by adequate use of tools. Even if you are making this argument, I maintain you are wrong.Go google that famous essay by P. Graham called 'Beating the Averages'. He addresses just this common fallacy and thoughtfully calls it 'The Blub Paradox'. Heck, I'll even provide you the link:<a class="user" href="http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html">http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html</a>
Agreed. Note the immediate knee-jerk "try to do the same thing in COBOL" as if comparing cars to apples is somehow reinforcing their argument that Ruby is "different". While there are many smart people who like and use Ruby, there are far more fan-boys who think that their syntactic familiarity with a "new language" puts them in the same circle. Where can you FIND idiots like this? We have plenty of work for mindless drones at my company.
RoR is great, but not every site fits into the MVC paradigm. So why choose one language over the other when they both excel at different things? People didn't stop using telephones when the Internet was invented. You're better off using both tools and knowing when to use them.
While I can't say that I've actually worked with the Ruby language that much, I have worked with a large number of low-level languages and high-level scripting languages. I've seen similar statements made about other languages before, but in truth I think the major gain usually comes from the paradigm that the framework implements and less from the language itself. In this case, I think you have a lot of frustrated Java programmers that have just about had it with the cumbersome and fugly J2EE stack. These guys are blown away by the simplicity of RoR and as a result are becoming Ruby guys by the droves. So I think it's more likely that Rails made Ruby, not the other way around. A related example is the Ajax movement. Sun, like usual is trying to staple another technology onto J2EE and as a result the framework gets more difficult to work with. Other frameworks suffer the same issue, possibly to a lesser extent. Real gains for Ajax will come in the next generation frameworks that are built entirely around the Ajax paradigm such as Backbase ( <a class="user" href="http://www.backbase.com">http://www.backbase.com</a> ), General Interface ( <a class="user" href="http://www.tibco.com">http://www.tibco.com</a> ) and ThinWire ( <a class="user" href="http://www.thinwire.com">http://www.thinwire.com</a> ).
jdogMay 15, 2006
This headline is making me hungry.
reverendpacoMay 15, 2006
"If a new language dramatically increases your productivity, you weren't a good enough programmer in your previous language to have written or adopted tools or practices that would have made you more productive in the first place." Wow mgainor,You are completely, 100% dead-wrong. Here's a simple thought experiment. Code a basic web application in Assembly, Basic or Cobol. Now do it in Java or C# or even C++. I bet you one of the latter is more productive than the former. If you can accept that there is a productivity difference in just this little thought experiment, than you can see how your statement is highly inaccurate.You *might* be arguing that among high-level languages, the _degree_ to which these languages provide productivity gains is negligible and/or compensated for by adequate use of tools. Even if you are making this argument, I maintain you are wrong.Go google that famous essay by P. Graham called 'Beating the Averages'. He addresses just this common fallacy and thoughtfully calls it 'The Blub Paradox'. Heck, I'll even provide you the link:<a class="user" href="http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html">http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html</a>
daschMay 15, 2006
So you're saying we should've stuck with ALGOL...?
jack9May 15, 2006
Agreed. Note the immediate knee-jerk "try to do the same thing in COBOL" as if comparing cars to apples is somehow reinforcing their argument that Ruby is "different". While there are many smart people who like and use Ruby, there are far more fan-boys who think that their syntactic familiarity with a "new language" puts them in the same circle. Where can you FIND idiots like this? We have plenty of work for mindless drones at my company.
tgoneMay 19, 2006
RoR is great, but not every site fits into the MVC paradigm. So why choose one language over the other when they both excel at different things? People didn't stop using telephones when the Internet was invented. You're better off using both tools and knowing when to use them.
pra9maMay 24, 2006
While I can't say that I've actually worked with the Ruby language that much, I have worked with a large number of low-level languages and high-level scripting languages. I've seen similar statements made about other languages before, but in truth I think the major gain usually comes from the paradigm that the framework implements and less from the language itself. In this case, I think you have a lot of frustrated Java programmers that have just about had it with the cumbersome and fugly J2EE stack. These guys are blown away by the simplicity of RoR and as a result are becoming Ruby guys by the droves. So I think it's more likely that Rails made Ruby, not the other way around. A related example is the Ajax movement. Sun, like usual is trying to staple another technology onto J2EE and as a result the framework gets more difficult to work with. Other frameworks suffer the same issue, possibly to a lesser extent. Real gains for Ajax will come in the next generation frameworks that are built entirely around the Ajax paradigm such as Backbase ( <a class="user" href="http://www.backbase.com">http://www.backbase.com</a> ), General Interface ( <a class="user" href="http://www.tibco.com">http://www.tibco.com</a> ) and ThinWire ( <a class="user" href="http://www.thinwire.com">http://www.thinwire.com</a> ).