I can’t spend any more time playing with Rails. It was fun and I have seen enough to know what this is all about and what I am missing. The Ajax tutorial was probably the most exciting one. Wondering if an action should be ajax based? Well just build it and see how it feels. With Rails it’s not like it will take you much time. And it will get better, much better, with things like autocompletion (like Google Suggest) and all other great scripts from script.aculo.us.
Ruby seems OK too, not that I was thrilled. I am not overly excited about any language, but I wonder what would have happened if David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails creator) had chosen a more popular language (e.g. PHP or perl). As it is, Rails is dragging Ruby up, while it should be the other way around.
It’s still early for anyone to know with certainty if Ruby on Rails will get really big. Hosting is a problem right now. There are some hosts supporting Rails (TextDrive, GeekISP, Planet Argon) but nowhere near those offering PHP hosting (virtually all).
On the other hand, the Rails part of the RoR equation, will probably make it, maybe by another language. I was pointed to PHP Cake and there is also Perl on Rails and Subway for Python. And that is good, because as a framework, Rails permits for really rapid development, without sacrificing quality.
Ruby is an awesome language. The greatest advantage is its readability. Where most other languages are all about scrict, puncutation-heavy syntax, where the actions are marred with unecessary parentheses and semi-colons, Ruby is clean and readable without sacrificing its pwer and versatility.
I believe that (for the most part) good ruby code, usually doesnt need comments.
Comment by Squeegy — June 29, 2005 @ 03:28
Point taken about readability. On the other hand someone could argue that you can write clean code in most languages…
Comment by Dimitris Giannitsaros — June 29, 2005 @ 11:11