From: James Britt <james_b@...>
Date: 2006-03-24T02:22:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails vs. Ruby Evolution

Justin Bailey wrote:
> Care to elaborate? Not asking for a flame war or anything. I've used Rails
> quite a bit and wanted to give Nitro a try on a toy project to see how I
> like it, but I've also tried to use Facets before and found it to not be
> well-documented, which irritated me. 

The lack of documentation is the bane of many projects.  There are 
efforts underway to improve this in Nitro and related libraries.

I've used Nitro for a number of projects, and not had any issues that 
weren't simply from bugs (that have since been fixed) or my own misuse 
due to lack of docs.

That a given library makes deep changes to core objects or behavior 
should not be an issue if the nature and reasoning for those changes are 
made clear.

I expect that when people build, say, a Rails application, that they are 
fully aware that the framework adds or munges certain aspects of Ruby, 
and that some of the things they are able to (or not) do differs from 
general Ruby programming.

As for certain features finding their way into the core language, 
general discussion of RCRs may be indicative.  It seems that if some 
feature is easily added though conventional means (a mixin, for example) 
then there is little enthusiasm for bundling it into the language.

For example, the to_json method is quite nice in certain cases, and has 
been available via a ruby-json gem for over a year now.    There's no 
compelling reason to make a part of Ruby itself, though.  It's too easy 
for developers to just add it when they want to.


-- 
James Britt

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