grantmichaels'blog

I have damn near talked myself out of Rails before I’ve even really begun, or so it appears anyways. I have had 6 months to ponder how I feel about “convention over configuration, ” and I’m not sure that I agree with that paradigm. Ruby I love, and if I were to choose a language purely based on it being beautiful code, it would rank second only to Smalltalk. The fallacy I can’t seem to ignore though, is that if you want to go outside of the convention in Rails, you can’t honestly have faith that everything will work as planned once you’ve altered the basis of the convention. You would then have to be *VERY* knowledgeable to be assured that the code was solid, and that means that in order to be able to go outside of Rails’ conventions, you would have to be of expert competency. And furthermore, you could have learned to code in any of the other higher performance language/framework combinations – like Erlang, Scala, or F#.

Ruby and Rails is often preached to be a great beginning language/framework combination, at least the books on the subject would have you believe this on the whole. This means that as a beginner you place your faith in the creator’s opinion regarding the convention which is provided to you, and I think that in my case, that has been a really hard thing to accept. For this reason, I think if I choose Ruby as my programming language over Python or Smalltalk – and I very well might, given the work being done with Ruby Processing and how interested I am in that project – that I will use Merb as my framework and learn Datamapper and rSpec while I await eventual OpenLASZLO integration. Otherwise, I’m definitely going to be giving Python and the Twisted.Web system a good look before I make up my mind – and I might just crack open this book I’ve been ignoring which covers haXe and neko …

grantmichaels