Betting on the wrong horse | Hacker News Reader

Betting on the wrong horse

wincent.com

42 pointswincent14 comments

Disturbingly, I could have written this exact article. But I never made the "ruby" mistake, to some of us, that was obvious, though Rails was a cool concept, just better implemented in other more performant languages.

> Rails was a cool concept, just better implemented in other more performant languages.

Agree and disagree.

The first win of Rails-inspired systems is the idea of actually providing decent building blocks for building a large application instead of just throwing you a router and some HTTP tools like the Sinatra-a-likes do. (If I had a dollar for ever minute I wasted dealing with writing something any decent Rails clone would have given me for just-about-free... that'd describe about 25% of several jobs I've held. :P)

But the two biggest wins of running Rails specifically are having a major community's worth of software around it, and having a Very Expressive Language with which to build the rest of it. These let you save on developer time in a variety of important circumstances where dealing with complexity is much more important than dealing with performance (internal-facing applications, for one, or XYZ-management-systems).

> Rails was a cool concept, just better implemented in other more performant languages.

Can you list your preferences?

PHP - Rails inspired some great frameworks on PHP and once they became available I promptly switched.

I realize I might take some flak for this : )

Specifically which framework? (And anybody giving you flak for using PHP is telling more about themselves than about you.)

Probably talking about Laravel.... I'm curious what you think not liking PHP says about someone?

He didn't say that someone not liking PHP says something about them. What he said was that someone giving flak to another for using PHP says something about them.

Ah ok sorry. I misread that.

Used to be Symfony. Now I am a happy Java camper but not on a Rails like framework ATM at least.

For Java I would say that Dropwizard if not a direct copy, definitely was inspired by the simplicity of Rails.

For Python it would probably be Django, but I'm still a novice in Python.

In terms of build chain, the declaritive nature of Maven as a build tool (far from perfect, but extensible) and then likewise in Python the setup.py bits.

Looking at other languages, Cargo has a similar declarative build chain for Rust, and I think a lot of the package management that we see out there was inspired generally by Ruby. Again, cool concepts, but for me Ruby never was more than a toy.

I can remember being at my first contract position in 1995/6 and suggesting to people that this new language Java was kinda cool and being told by many other people I was working with that it wasn't worth pursuing. So I didn't...

JavaScript is really cool and I did pursue that one. :)

The article displays nothing but a blank page with JavaScript turned off…

Well, the blog's author is a Javascript developer :)

Guilty as charged. The blog is new (days old), but server rendering will be coming.

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