Rick Bradley makes me want to try Ruby and Ruby on Rails.
Rails is not a Silver Bullet. However, widely reported results place productivity increases over modern Java methodologies (e.g., J2EE, Struts, etc.) in the 6-fold to 10-fold range (with many of these claims coming from long-time Java luminaries). Preliminary tests by our Technical Lead put the code reduction for a normal module in our Java stack converted to Rails at roughly 20:1.
Sounds awfully fun. On hiring:
Posted by jjwiseman at November 24, 2005 12:30 AMI’ve personally found it’s much easier to find the “smart people” we’re looking for in the Ruby community since the community seems to be self-selecting the smart folks—that is, that the likelihood some random person I run into in the Ruby community is highly experienced, smart, and adaptable, is much greater than the likelihood of saying the same with people selected at random from, say, the Java community.
Does Seaside make you want to try out Smalltalk? From what I've read, it does a better job than even Rails.
The thing that I wonder though is, why don't all the lispers get together and make something even better? Or are we just not interested and want to jump ship to a language where someone has already done it? (I know I've considered it... jumping ship) The only thing that gives me hope is Marc Battyani and his amazing framework, which I still see as a holy grail. I don't do web dev, but everytime I consider, I keep thinking, wow, I could jump ship, but we could build this (it can be done, he has done it)... the sad thing is, it'll take time... and really who has that? :)
As Marc said to me in an email once,
"You don't try enough ;-)
The problem is that it takes time to make a new solution from scratch for web applications as well as other stuff."
And he's right... maybe the Ruby/Smalltalk guys just want it more.
Posted by: Eric on November 24, 2005 08:19 AMTry it, John... you won't regret it. Even the learning experience and the mind-opening associated with it is revolutionary.
Although, being a lisp expert, your mind is probably more open already than mine...
Is there any more information about Battyani's framework? The only thing I could find was a generic powerpoint presentation, and some quotes from people that were blown away by it.
The powerpoint presentation said it's been in production since 2002.
Posted by: MJ on November 24, 2005 08:35 PMThere is a bit more information on Battyani's framework here:
http://prog.vub.ac.be/events/2005/BADL/ilc2002-marc-battyani.pdf
Posted by: ME on November 24, 2005 08:53 PMApropos, there was some to-and-fro at Finding Lisp recently on why Ruby was "getting play" while Lisp was not. "If we had LoL In A Box there might be a different answer".
http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2005/11/ruby-getting-play.html
http://www.cliki.net/lisp-on-lines
Posted by: ME on November 24, 2005 08:59 PMAs for that paragraph on hiring: remark how it's similiar to some famous Erik Naggum's posts about lisp/clos programmers vs c/c++ guys.
Posted by: j on November 27, 2005 02:33 AMIf you didn't like embedded java in jsp then you probably will be non-plused by embedded ruby in ruby page templates. Its hardly 'revolutionary' - that's laughable! It's fun stuff to play with but I won't be signing up for the RoR Circle Jerk.
Posted by: snappergrass on November 27, 2005 03:20 PM