I've said it before, I'll say it again - in 5 to 10 years, people will view RoR as they view PHP today - as something that's ruined a lot of programmers.
How much of this sounds familiar?
> “Design Patterns are a Java thing. In Ruby you just write code.”
> “The warnings Ruby produces are dumb; just disable them.”
> In a way I think this is a testament to the power of the platform. If you’re getting a 500 error in a Rails app, you can keep adding kludge after kludge and hitting “reload” until it works. No need to ever write a test or refactor. In languages and frameworks with a lower turnaround time, this kind of tweak-it-till-it-works workflow is simply impractical. Ruby on Rails has an impressively low barrier to fiddling.
This is all a religious war, but at the end of the day something like Rails enables you to come a lot closer to "good design, good programming" than many other systems currently in use, i.e. your less than favourite PHP or Java framework here.
I think that someone who honestly believes PHP has RUINED them may be a bit of a tool. We're programmers, we can figure it out.
> at the end of the day something like Rails enables you to come a lot closer to "good design, good programming" than many other systems currently in use
The same thing's been said about PHP.
And sure, PHP ruins programmers like BASIC does - not at all, if they've some brain cells they can rub together. But it does teach shitty habits which can take time and effort to forget.
I don't think that RoR will be looked back upon the same way as PHP. PHP is a language with a buggy interpreter with a ghetto as a standard library with a community consisting of a bunch of script kiddies. </flame>
Ruby on Rails is closer to Java J2EE, in all it's enterpriseyness. It may not use a whole lot of XML files here and there, but it's got a similar flavor IMHO. Lots of stuff happens by "convention over configuration". The XML shit from J2EE is just replaced with a little bit of domain specific code within Ruby.
I can only speculate what's the root cause here. Is the web stack just so horribly broken with session cookies and whatnot? Or the problem of displaying the content of a relational database in a HTML page a difficult problem? Or is it just trying to force a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that is not well defined?
How much of this sounds familiar?
> “Design Patterns are a Java thing. In Ruby you just write code.”
> “The warnings Ruby produces are dumb; just disable them.”
> In a way I think this is a testament to the power of the platform. If you’re getting a 500 error in a Rails app, you can keep adding kludge after kludge and hitting “reload” until it works. No need to ever write a test or refactor. In languages and frameworks with a lower turnaround time, this kind of tweak-it-till-it-works workflow is simply impractical. Ruby on Rails has an impressively low barrier to fiddling.