philcrissman.com

Man… In an article whose headline begins with the word “Blasphemy,” AlterThought’s Un.Rust blog dares to state the case against Ruby on Rails… and makes some excellent (though painful to read) observations.

The author states it several ways, but the main thread of the observations seems to be that since Rails is capable of doing so much construction automatically, it enables amateur coders to pass themselves off as developers, and wind up costing their clients extra money because the application they wind up with needs to be rewritten, revised, doesn’t scale, etc, etc. I’d hate to think that’s happening, but at the same time, I’m sure it is.

That’s actually one reason I’m unwilling to answer ads for Rails developers or to pass myself off as a Rails consultant — I’m painfully aware that I don’t (yet) know enough about either Rails, or full-scale web application development, to do that in good conscience. That’s actually one reason that I’m working on my Microlinks application in my spare time; yes, if it is actually successful (or even semi-successful), I’ll be very pleased. More than that, it provides an opportunity to really learn the framework, “gotchas” and all.

In the back of my mind, I’m hoping I can also write a small application in Django at some point… just because the experience of comparing Rails to Django would be valuable. Also, Python is as excellent a language as Ruby, and I’d just like to try it.