The infamous Zed Rails Rant was drawn to my attention a few days ago.
Makes interesting reading, and I have to say I don't grok enough about the Rails community and names mentioned to be fully clear about the details of his issues, but there were a couple of interesting remarks that drew my attention:
- 'The MBA attitude is best summarized in this statement, ââ¬ÅI demand all of your creativity, yet trust none of your judgment.ââ¬Â'
- Made me wince rather - been there, done that, worked for people who wouldn't take 'no, this is technically impossible/bad net ettiquette/stupid/can't be done robustly in the timescale you want' for an answer.
- "...Ruby on Rails means stay on the Rails. There is an established best practice way to build web applications with Rails and thatââ¬â¢s the entire point of the system."
- This definitely caught my eye. Perl has TWTOWTDI writ large through it, and it is, I am really very sure, a major reason we're getting no love from outside the community in the web framework arena. Despite the fact there's a number of damn fine web frameworks out there. Rails wins by being /the/ Ruby web framework, having a set of established best practices so any monkey with half a brain and some coding skills can produce the goods, having an aggressive hype machine and being able to deliver the promised hype. (Yes, you can take issue with that last, if you like :) but the fact remains there /are/ some damn good websites made with Rails.)
Interview with Zed
Bernhard on 2008-01-06T18:54:00
You might also be interested in an interview with Zed Shaw,
http://ajaxian.com/archives/zed-shaw-interview-on-rails-community-enterprise-aja x-patents-and-a-whole-lot-more
He also talks a virtual machine options for Ruby.
Sadly Parrot isn't even considered.
