Railing against Ruby
Somewhat inevitably, given the level of hype it has generated, the Ruby “backlash” appears to be gathering momentum (no doubt prompted in part by some inflammatory blog postings in recent days).
Bryan Taylor has written a critique of Ruby (and Rails) and suggests that perhaps it’s about to have its lunch eaten by Erlang. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions, but it’s worth a read. I’m not sure that Ruby (or Rails) killed Perl. As distasteful as you and I may find it, Perl programmers love their language. I don’t think anything will kill Perl. It was undead before Ruby and it’s still undead now. If Rails should have killed anything it would be PHP. Maybe it still will, but PHP is firmly entrenched at the low end thanks to ubiquitous cheap hosting deals and an easy path from pure HTML authoring to server-side development.
Being a novice with both Ruby and Rails, I reserve the right to declare Ruby the One True Language at some point in the future but, for now, I’m still firmly in the static-typing camp.
One thing that I do find mildly amusing about this whole debate is the argument that Java should be used in preference to Ruby because of its superior performance. Isn’t that what the C++ people were saying in 1995?
on September 24th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Dunno. It seems like the RoR frenzy was to a greater-or-lesser degree driven by Pragmatic Programmers, and now that they have published an Erlang book we’re suddenly seeing the momentum shift in that direction.
Call me skeptical. Ruby is fine, interesting even, but it’s not all that.
And Active Record sucks, sorry.
on September 26th, 2007 at 6:49 am
It’s sad that a few bad apples from the RoR community have made people feel like the ruby/rails community is full of a bunch of fanboys.
(really not trying to blogspam but I blogged more on that here): http://sablog.com/archives/2007/09/23/humans-suck-at-understanding-sample-sizes
It lowers the dialog and generally makes people on both sides look like d-bags when the debate gets lowered to the level of calling each other fanboys & taking potshots at one another. (i.e. the RailsEnvy guys might be guilty of this)
bwtaylor’s sticking point, which is just silly imho, is that he likes ruby but won’t use rails because a few “fanboys” have adopted the language and spout off on their blogs or whatever.
That’s like being a Linux fan one minute and then deciding to switch back to Windows because a few fanboy linux bloggers got some attention all of a sudden. (let’s face it, “fanboys” exist for everything)
on October 6th, 2007 at 3:33 am
Thank you for sharing!