From: gwtmp01@...
Date: 2006-03-23T00:33:25+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails vs. Ruby Evolution


On Mar 22, 2006, at 10:15 AM, Eric Kidd wrote:
> Many of the most useful Rails extensions are actually provided by  
> ActiveSupport, which can be installed as a gem and used from non- 
> Rails applications.
>
> [...]
>
> This is a nice feature of Ruby: You can add new polymorphic  
> behavior to other people's classes, which requires caution, but can  
> be very useful in the right circumstances. It's sort of like a  
> single-dispatch version of generic functions.

I think it is great that the language is flexible enough to allow these
sorts of extensions.  I understand that they are all bundled into
ActiveSupport (or Facets) but that doesn't remove the potential for
syntactic or semantic clashes or overlaps between ActiveSupport, Facets,
and the standard distribution.

The proliferation of core class add-ons doesn't really matter if they
are small additions used by a couple of projects.  When it becomes
large additions used by hugely popular frameworks, then it starts to
become a different ball game.

I've been playing with ActiveRecord but the price for doing that is
that much of ActiveSupport is also dragged in even though I'm not using
it directly.  If I were to release my project it would now be  
dependent on
ActiveSupport simply because ActiveRecord depends on it.

I'm not taking a position on the particular additions in Facets or
ActiveSupport.  I'm just uneasy about where this is all heading.


Gary Wright