[CALUG] Ruby and Rusty Rails

[James Ewing Cottrell 3rd]

Randal T. Rioux wrote:

>Jason C. Miller wrote:
>  
>
>>Since Beau mentioned a LAMP position, I might as well segue (sp?) into a
>>question of mine.  What is the popular opinion on here regarding the Rails
>>(Ruby) framework?  Is everyone else finding that it's taking off like a
>>bat-out-of-windows in industry?
>>    
>>
>
>Blech.
>
>Not in the government, knock-on-wood.
>
>Randy
>
You don't sound entirely enthused. Might I ask why?

I think the real problem with something like RoR is that it fights an 
established base. Specifically, Perl.

Perl is the most brain-dead collection of special case hacks ever thrown 
together in a language. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most 
powerful. It's a chain-saw, useful, but dangerous.

Python is probably a better language, but it's dependence on white-space 
almost disqualifies it.

Ruby, like Smalltalk and LISP suffers from being too sophisticated to be 
embraced by the mainstream.

Speaking of LISP, HTML and XML would have worked much better as 
S-expressions. Consider:

(html ()
(head () (title () A Web Page))
(body ()
(h2 ((color . red)(font . times)) Off With His Head!)
(p ((color . black) Curiouser (i () and) curiouser.)))

The first argument of each list is a placeholder for the  attrubutes, a 
few of which have been shown, implemented as an alist. Indentation would 
improve readability of course.

It doesn't look much different to a human, but it's much easier to parse 
for a computer and the routines to handle nested lists already exist and 
are well understood.

JIM