Ruby on Rails chases simplicity in programming

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Looked like a pain to me...

I took a look at Ruby on Rails a few months ago. I got pretty excited about it, especially after seeing the video on their website. Looking deeper into it though, it looked like a major hassle to learn. It wasn't C-style syntax, it was a totally different syntax, like using Scheme or something.

There are two kinds of programmers out there, those who are incredibly specialised in one language, and those who touch a lot of them lightly. I fall into the latter category. The only reason why I can do my job at all, at this point, is because all but one of the languages I use (the odd man out is VB.Net, and I may switch to C# on those projects partially for this reason) C-style syntax. As it is, I have a hard time within the C-style languages keeping them straight. I cannot remember how many times I tried a Perl regex in Java, or tried referencing a JDBC method while working in the .Net Framework, or something similar.

The last thing I need is another language, espcially one with a syntax as different as Ruby's is. Personally, what I want as a developer, is one language or set of languages that work well together, and contain the building blocks for just about everything I can imagine. Microsoft's .Net Framework does that extraordinarily well. It's unfortunate that it's Microsoft only (yeah, I know there's Mono, but I have never, NEVER EVER trusted open source emulations/rewrites of Microsoft's products, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because Microsoft is so reluctant to document the internals of things), because I truly prefer to deplay to *Nix. Oh well, can't win 'em all. But Ruby, no matter how cool or fast it may be, just has no place in my busy day for me to learn it.

J.Ja

Posted by: Justin James   Posted on: 10/31/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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