From: Ryan Leavengood <mrcode@...>
Date: 2005-07-19T02:18:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby momentum?

Kirk Haines said:
>
> As a Ruby discussion, though, I think it's important to look past all
> of that to the reason why so many people who have never touched Ruby
> before are liking Rails.  It's not because of Rails, itself.  It's
> because of Ruby.  Rails has some magic and convenience and nifty
> things to make the developer's life simpler, but it's the Ruby that
> converts these PHP and Java guys to using it.  And when they show off
> their accomplishments to others, it's the Ruby that's going to hook
> them as well, and I think that's a win for everyone, even if the walk
> to get there was filled with some exaggerated emotionalism.

I definitely agree that the magic in Rails is primarily because of Ruby
and the very Rubyish way Rails is written (and obviously credit for that
goes to David et al.) But at the same time it seems that many Railers just
see Ruby as that little thing that they barely need to know to create
Rails apps, instead of seeing Rails as a Ruby web application framework.
But that could just be the designers who became web app developers instead
of programmers who became web app developers. In my opinion the
programmers will more than likely be the ones doing the real innovation
and fully embracing Ruby, whereas the designers may not develop the
programming skill for that.

I do feel that there needs to be some good Ruby frameworks in other
domains to help bring the hype back over to Ruby itself and not just
Rails. It is nice to see that even when Java or PHP or name your other
language advocates talk about Rails they still almost always give Ruby a
good word or two.

Ryan