[Hidden-tech] Ruby on Rails

[Chas Emerick]

It seems to me that handicapping which language, framework, or  
methodology will be dominant or popular is a fabulously bad way to  
choose such things.  If you are a technologist, computer scientist,  
or entrepreneur, the only rational approach is to find the *best*  
tools for the job at hand -- because I can guarantee you that that's  
what the future leaders of your field or market are doing right now.

Now, what's best for you or your company is likely different than  
what is best for me and mine, but surely it's not whatever is most  
popular, will be most popular, is most like X, Y, or Z, or whether it  
uses curly braces, blocks, colons, or whitespace in its syntax.  All  
that is fashion, not rigor.

Cheers,

Chas Emerick
Founder, Snowtide Informatics Systems
Enterprise-class PDF content extraction

cemerick at snowtide.com
http://snowtide.com


On Feb 13, 2007, at 8:41 AM, Gavin Andresen wrote:

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>
> Rich is right-- the big problem with Ruby on Rails is that Ruby  
> isn't in the C/C++ family of languages. C, C++, C#, Java, and PHP  
> are all close enough in semantics and syntax that it's fairly easy  
> to switch between them.
>
> Ruby may be a superior programming language but I'd be it will end  
> up like the other "superior to C/C++" programming languages (like  
> Lisp and Smalltalk)-- it will have a dedicated group of enthusiasts  
> and will be used for one or two high-profile projects, but won't be  
> able to overcome the inertia of millions of programmers who have  
> curly-brace syntax hardwired into their fingers.  The best concepts  
> from Rails are starting to get ported to other programming  
> languages/frameworks...
>
> -- 
> --
> Gavin Andresen
> My latest project: http://www.gavintools.com/
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