Ruby

No, my machine was not hacked. Yes, I do believe that DHH and the Rails community has done far more to advance web development than the Apache Software Foundation. I radically disagree with J Aaron Farr's post comparing the two.

I read What's wrong with Ruby yesterday, including many of the "comments." Putting aside the substance of the article, the tone of the responses really bugged me. There were plenty of ad hominem attacks and very little discussion about the substance of the posting.

A while back, I got cranky about some Ruby guy suggesting that Java folk who use static typing as a tool must be stupid. Someone asked me about my view of advocacy... well here goes...

I have been porting a Rails application to the lift web framework.

In this installment, I show an example of a Rails controller method and the converted lift snippet method. Thus I discuss the lift and Scala idioms

Also, for those folks who have claimed I'm a "Java guy" and "don't get Rails." I'd like to differ with you. I've written 7 commercial Rails applications and have been doing Rails work since 2005. While I'm not the best Rails coder on the planet, I'm pretty proficient with Rails and with Ruby. For those folks who are branding lift as a Rails clone, I differ with you as well. I am borrowing the best of Rails, but I view TurboGears and Seaside as the true "thought drivers" for lift. I am using a Rails app that I'm converting to lift because the commercial app that I'm involved in building was written in Rails and we decided to move away from Rails because Rails could not scale to suit our needs (read my prior post where I outline why Rails cannot scale to meet our needs.)

It was a year ago that I went to the SD Forum Silicon Valley Ruby Conference. I listened with awe to Chad Fowler talking about language patterns, Ruby's evolution, both as a language and as a series of idioms. The energy in the room was warm, welcoming, and felt like a bunch of people who had found a good path and were looking to improve the language, the environment, and make Ruby the best language and the best environment for folks to hang out in. Chad talked a lot about the Ruby way. It wasn't a religion with zealots. It was a bunch of folks taking a journey to make things better for themselves and others. Cool! Sign Me Up!!

Things have changed a lot in a year.

I am wicked impressed with Charles Nutter and the JRuby team. They take things step by step and improve performance and compatibility incrementally. A few days ago, they broke the native Ruby performance barrier.

These guys rock!

I apologize for the other factual errors and spelling errors in the blog post. I stand corrected on the green vs. giant lock issue in YARV. However, (and correct me if I'm wrong about this as well) the performance improvements and degree of parallelization that YARV brings is marginal (< 40%) compared to the existing 1.8 implementation. If I am mistaken about this please correct me.

What I stand by is that Rails defines Ruby. Let me expound on this statement.

I've been casting about recently, looking for a good set of tools for building applications... mainly applications with a web interface.

I've looked at a lot of environments. Ruby/Rails and Smalltalk/Seaside offer a lot of cool, compelling features.