From: James Britt Date: 2005-03-22T04:22:33+09:00 Subject: Re: Support for 10x Productivity Increase with Rails! Glenn Parker wrote: > Curt Hibbs wrote: > >> >> Bruce Tate and his partner Justin Gehtland were engaged by a client to >> replace an web app that had originally taken the company a year to >> develop. >> Justin took 4 months to reimplement this web app using Spring and >> Hibernate. >> Bruce characterized Spring/Hibernate as among the most productive >> frameworks >> available in the Java space. >> >> Recently, Justin decided to re-implement with Ruby on Rails. Bruce >> said that >> this took a total of 5 days (Justin's weblog reported 4 days for 80% >> completion so, presumably, 5 days is for the whole thing)! > > > The devil's advocate would ask, how much of that first four months was > devoted to Justin developing his expertise in the application itself? > Once you've mastered an application's logic, you have a distinct > advantage when re-implementing it in another environment. I agree; I find that Ruby gives me an 11x increase ("Well, it's one faster, isn't it? It's not ten." ) in productivity over Ruby whenever I decide to rewrite a Ruby app in Ruby. A good deal of development time is figuring out where the specs or goals are wrong or incomplete, and sorting things out. Once I've written something, in whatever language, porting it over (or simply rewriting it) almost always goes faster; there's less thinking involved. I have a problem with assorted claims based on anecdotal testimony, however expert and/or reliable the person making the claim. They almost always come off sounding like biased hype, and the lack of any objective proof allows people to go away believing whatever the want to believe anyway. Much better, I think, to make demonstrable assertions about the tool or language itself, and let others make their own comparisons based on their own experience. James Britt -- http://www.ruby-doc.org http://www.rubyxml.com http://catapult.rubyforge.com http://orbjson.rubyforge.com http://ooo4r.rubyforge.com http://www.jamesbritt.com