Interesting conversation about Rails:
LJ: Ambitious. Any particular reason you initially chose Rails over some other framework for your blog?DF: By this point in my career I've seen enough scripting languages and learned enough languages that I'm not running out there to learn a new scripting language as soon as it comes out. It's really got to be something special for me to want to learn it. You were the catalyst for getting me into Ruby, and because the Rails hype was starting to reach critical mass at the same time, that's what drew me into Rails.
LJ: But surely well-designed classes could grok XML that somehow dictated cascading deletes?DF: Yeah, that's true, but it's really nice for the programmer to be able to keep everything--model, view, controller--all in one language. In Rails you don't have to split out state and behavior into separate files; you can describe it all in one file using the same language. Plus, in practice, only a few of these configuration steps even need to be taken, because Rails model-objects are designed to reflect on the database at runtime. It's not an exaggeration to say that your entire controller-class could end up being shorter than a single XML configuration file.
LJ: But some big name developers out there seem to have had a fairly negative response to all the Rails hype. Why do you think that is?Posted by Josh at April 15, 2005 09:14 AM | TrackBackDF: I think fear of any technology is not really based in reality, because what is technology after all? It's just another way of solving a problem. But I hear what you're saying, I've read some comments that I feel totally were not based on the facts. I think that some of it is probably due to people who really are invested in one framework or the other and maybe are afraid that Rails' momentum could threaten their authority or their opportunities if it were to take over a lot of market share in "web-app-framework-land". So there's that, and then there's the whole thing of if this becomes "the way to do it", then they'll have to start learning a whole new language and framework all over again.