

Do Frameworks Spur Adoption Of Programming Languages? - cfontes
http://java.dzone.com/news/do-frameworks-spur-adoption

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patio11
Rails was certainly the killer app for Ruby in the English speaking world.
Without that, it's chief fame would be as Perl-with-better-syntax utility goo
in Japan.

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mahmud
I decided to learn it by writing a lexer for it in Lisp. Few pages into the
spec I saw its objects are printed #<like this>. I was learning both Lisp and
Ruby at the time, so I dismissed it as a Lisp with perl-syntax. That was in
2000 :-)

Never bothered to learn it still.

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steveklabnik
The reason I love Ruby is because I do consider it to be 'an acceptable Lisp.'

For extra fun, you can write really nice sexps in Ruby by just using arrays
with a symbol as the first element...

    
    
        [:puts, [:+, 2, 3]]
    

I wrote a tiny compiler with an IR that did that. Stole the idea from
<http://www.hokstad.com/compiler>

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mahmud
Ruby is nice in it's own right, it doesn't need to be an acceptable Lisp or an
adequate Smalltalk.

If anything, Ruby teaches programmers to _enjoy_ making software. It's awesome
to see so much attention going into detail, and improving aesthetics. That's a
good attitude to encourage.

Plus it's a bloody _useful_ language to know.

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steveklabnik
What I mean is, I love Ruby because I see so much Lisp in it. Lisps are about
the only languages more metaprogramming-enabled than Ruby is.

And the software engineering dedication certainly doesn't hurt.

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hboon
Smalltalk?

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jcromartie
I think they just spur adoption of the framework.

Ruby didn't really catch on because of Rails. Rails did. There are a
frightening amount of professional programmers who think Ruby is "a web
language" or don't know the difference between Ruby and Rails.

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jnoller
Yes, Django has spurred a very large number of "new to Python" hackers. I was
stunned by the number of "we got into python because of Django" people at
Djangocon and PyCon in 2010.

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Kilimanjaro
I'd say affordable hosting for the masses above everything else. If I can't
play with it, I won't code for it.

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gmac
Not sure everyone feels that way -- Rails took off plenty before there were
any good hosting options, and I'd say Rails hosting is still harder/dearer
than PHP (despite the awesomeness of Passenger/mod_rails).

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steveklabnik
Any particular reason that it's harder? With Passenger, the workflow is
seemingly identical.

(That said, I use nginx/unicorn)

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gmac
I was thinking of the unavailability of cheap shared web hosting (which I
guess actually only justifies the 'dearer' part). And I may be out of date on
that too...

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steveklabnik
As someone who's deployed a Sinatra app to shared web hosting a few days ago,
no, that totally sucks.

But here's the thing: VPSes are so cheap now, I don't know why you'd ever go
with shared hosting in this day and age. I don't have a job right now and I
still haven't bothered to turn off my VPS, even though I don't use it... come
to think of that, I should probably go log into the Rackspace console...

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gmac
Absolutely. I love Linode! But when I was starting out with Rails my sysadmin
skills wouldn't have been up to that, even if the VPS landscape had been the
way it now is.

