
Blasphemy: The Case Against Ruby on Rails - nickb
http://alterlabs.com/articles/blasphemy-the-case-against-ruby-on-rails/
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mattculbreth
Bah. Pretty well written article but it's just another "don't like Rails
because it's a fad" type deals. I did agree with the part about Rails being
ultra-suitable for one type of project (business apps against a relationship
DB) and that you run into trouble if you go too far away from it. But that
doesn't mean at all that Rails isn't cool as can be.

I'm finishing off a consulting project now with Rails and everybody's happy.
For my startup though we're staying with Python and the much lower level
Pylons.

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Zak
I'm not sure what sort of case the author intends to make here. If he's saying
Rails isn't the best fit for all possible projects, that's blindingly obvious.
If he's saying you should think twice before using Rails when it _is_ a good
fit, most of his arguments don't apply.

The one I do think needs some confronting is the "no throat to choke"
argument. It's just silly: if you research any sufficiently popular tool,
you'll find out what areas it falls short in. If you aren't able to work
around the problem as easily as you thought, you'll end up with delays and
bugs. With a vendor supported product, you can choke your vendor rep until he
helps you solve your problem. This usually takes as long or longer than fixing
it yourself, and the result is the same: your project is still late and buggy.

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menloparkbum
Rails has some serious problems, but the article does not address any of them.
I would be glad to explain them for $175/hr.

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sloba
i don't think the author was coming at this from a techie's perspective, but
from the perspective of a manager/leader who has to make a technology choice.
That being said, given the framework, Its hard to separte Rails "the
technology" from Rails "the movement" -- which does, i hate to say, have more
than its fair share of knucklehead programmers; the key difference between a
knucklehead java programmer and a knucklehead Ruby/Rails programmer is that
the former can be found out much more readily (more peeps are familiar with
java) than the latter. Therefore, people can/are/will be taken advantage of
during a craze ...

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chaostheory
"i don't think the author was coming at this from a techie's perspective, but
from the perspective of a manager/leader who has to make a technology choice."

Yes a non-technical manager in a large corporation... that makes perfect sense
to post this on ycombinator...

"given the framework, Its hard to separte Rails "the technology" from Rails
"the movement" "

Umm only if you're not technical or too lazy to really study it (making half
assed assumptions instead)... I really don't mind good critiques of rails
(slow, lacking standard functionality, ...), but come on - this has got to be
one of the most stupid article posted

" the key difference between a knucklehead java programmer and a knucklehead
Ruby/Rails programmer is that the former can be found out much more readily
(more peeps are familiar with java) than the latter."

(being a former java programmer) no offense but can you actually back this up
with real numbers/case studies instead of pulling it out of your ass - like
the author did?

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sloba
chaos, you make good points re: separation of technology/movement and
immaturity/inexperience/posing of Rails developers .. i can't site a case
study, but having to re-write a few supposedly "Rails" apps myself, i can tell
you - at least anecdotally -- that there is some truth to the poser Rubyist
observation ..

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patang
He has a point. Rails works for startups and for departmental level stuff.
Some larger, well-funded startups are also using it, but not without Java for
the complex back-end processing. Good post. Good find.

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chaostheory
I disagree. This is one of the most stupid critiques of rails that I've seen
and I just dont think people who voted this story up actually read the
article.

Don't get me wrong there are good critiques of rails like from Bryan of
likebetter or Django's creator, but this one is just near retarded.

A lot of the author's points you can find in other languages as well (such as
pretenders in java or 'x' language), and most of it is just criticizing for
either its popularity with startups or lack of enterprise adoption.

I just don't think the author has enough knowledge of either rails or ruby to
really comment on it. (Ruby is a clean way of fast prototyping and it can
scale if you replace the inefficient bottlenecks with inline C, ...)

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patang
"if you replace ... with inline C.." I think that's part of the author's point
Java/Groovy/Grails offer a richer set of tools, now that Ruby/Rails .. don't
get me wrong, I love Rails and am an avid proponent, but it is true that many
have consumed the coolaid/channelled DHH and have been a little blinded by its
capabilities .. not a bad article. Dude has also got an article supporting
Rails as a choice .. both posts seem to come at it from a relatively "non-
techie" perspective -- more from the Mgr view ...

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chaostheory
"I think that's part of the author's point Java/Groovy/Grails offer a richer
set of tools, now that Ruby/Rails"

Unfortunately he didn't say that in the article.

"Dude has also got an article supporting Rails as a choice"

I hate to be mean, but I hope it doesn't suck as hard as this article ala
"rails is great because everyone in a startup is using it"

"both posts seem to come at it from a relatively non-techie perspective --
more from the Mgr view "

geared towards PHBs in a large stale corporation? Again I really fail to see
the point of this post on ycombinator

Oh yeah something I forgot to mention - in terms of overcoming a rails app's
inefficiencies/problems with scalability, there's also this magical thing
called web services (REST, SOAP); you know a rails app could talk to a java or
C based app on another server...

