Ramblings of a Northerner

Ruby on Rails - What’s the hype about?!

June 9th, 2006

Ok - so I’m new to it, but at first glance, it provides nothing that doesn’t exist already in other languages.  Perhaps it has some value in built in AJAX, but seriously, if you know what you’re doing with javascript, that part is somewhat trivial.  Also, I don’t need yet ANOTHER language that does the same thing as ASP, JSP, Perl, PHP, Python – I mean seriously, especially one with as crappy a syntax as Ruby.  Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m biased, but Ruby and Rails seems like a good idea in a world that doesn’t have J2EE application servers overflowing the dumpster bin.  Just giving me another record abstraction for SELECT * FROM TABLE(x) doesn’t do anything to make my life easier, it only provides marginal improvement over what I’m doing now in a completely different language construct.

That was my first day looking at Ruby — maybe in the next while I’ll find some secret major value there or it will actually turn my programming life around and make every task trivial…

… but I highly doubt it.

Entry Filed under: Rant, Technology