As a follow-up on I am getting Ruby-fied, Ruby’s not ready - glyphobet • ???????? • ???????? does a much better job at going over Ruby’s faults. Ruby on Rails is not discussed except to say that it and Pylons are very similar, but i tend to agree that a lot of the different web frameworks out there are quite similar because they all include what is needed of a modern framework.

The author has had more experience in Ruby(and Ruby on Rails) than i did obviously, so i won’t try to go into the things he did. I also can’t validate all his concerns, but i can validate most and agree with most. So i can’t go as deep as he could in the discussion because as expected, the RoR project has been stalled for the past month or so. But let me review my previous assumptions and determine what was and wasn’t true. Note that i will refrain from commenting on the things that i can not yet validate to keep things objective.

That is definitely true. But the many quirks in there make it really difficult to learn the language in any deep manner. I mean to_s ? Come on. Really? to_str i might understand(which does another thing all together) but to_s? And that’s just saying one thing that i find highly annoying, take a look at the linked article and be amazed.

Definitely true. Although, Python and Java being old has worked to their advantage. Both languages have evolved in a generally useful direction. Ruby on the other hand seems to be this toy language that suddenly got immensly popular and is now struggling to become a modern language.

Hmmmm…. I am not sure about this one. Ruby is very lax in its syntax and that makes it terrible to read and definitly not beautiful. In fact, this whole flexibility has turned me off the language completely.

That’s true. If you turn off the noise generated by the fan boys then you would find some wise people telling you not to use Ruby for things it wasn’t designed for.

I did follow that approach on leanring Ruby and well, i think that with proper coding standards, Ruby code can be quite elegant. My only problem is fan boys turning turning Ruby into php.

Also true. In fact, my suspicions were quite correct here in that the language doesn’t have a very clear path. But again, this seems to be a subjective issue.

Well, there’s nothing i can do about that expcept advise my clients(and anybody else who asks) about the proper technology.

Well, this wasn’t very accurate. I wasn’t intimidated by the convention in RoR, and actually think they’re quite reasonable. The conventions and quirks in Ruby however were a PITA. In an RoR project however, you would be more worried about developing within RoR rather than worrying about Ruby’s idiosyncricities.

I haven’t worked with capistrano yet, but Rake is cool. I like the way migrations work with some minor comments(should be fixed in RoR 2.1 i think) and i also like the way unit and integration tests are considered to be part of the project development as opposed to “extra development”. I hate the way JS using prototype is dealt with in RoR and prefer Django’s “use whatever you like” atitude and for good reason. Scaffolding is nice at first look, but nobody actually sticks with it except for very small applications. The book i was reading didn’t describe static scaffolding, that seems to be a nice approach to it. And so on….

Things have definitely changed with RoR. I still prefer Django immensly because of the general atitude of its developers, but…..

True at first, but RoR is its own beast now. There are still some existing problems, but then again, there always is.

This is definitly also true of RoR. So the comment is valid, but it doesn’t apply correclty to RoR. RoR was extracted from a 37Signals application(backpack was it?) and so is also a field-produced framework.

So in summary, i still wouldn’t use either Ruby or RoR if i had the choice. But depending on its couterpart in comparsion, they might just win.