From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2006-09-10T08:28:56+09:00 Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programmingr Chad Perrin wrote: > If you're going to debate the scale of productivity increase for web > development gained with Rails, perhaps you should also debate these > mythic software performance gains for .NET over Rails. I haven't seen any benchmarks one way or the other. So I can't comment with any assurance. Nobody is paying me to improve the performance of either .NET or Ruby, but since Ruby is an open-source project, it's only natural that I'd choose to volunteer in that direction. :) But I'm a lot more interested in hard numerical apps than web apps at the moment. > I, frankly, am > not convinced .NET grants any notable performance benefit over Rails on > average, at all. Neither am I, as I noted above. But Joel Spolsky is, so I think it's at least worth investigating how he came to his conclusions and tearing said arguments apart. I think what he is saying is that *today's* Ruby interpreters are slower that *today's* .NET run-times, and not anything about Rails vs. NET for web apps. Yes, the line about buying five machines vs. one is a cheap shot. Speaking of which, does anyone know what the underlying platform is for MySpace? Windows? .NET? LAMP? Something else? > I'm more convinced of productivity gains for Rails > programmers over .NET programmers, however. With equal levels of experience? Equal levels of application domain knowledge? The same processes? All factors equal except .NET vs. Rails? That's a competition I'd like to see, if there's some way to set it up. It's very rare, however, that all other factors *are* equal. Most of the claims of improved productivity for Rails -- the ones I believe, anyhow -- are made by people with many years of experience in web development under their belt and much of that experience with a mature Java framework. In short, all they have to learn is where to find everything in Rails and the details of the Rails domain-specific language. They already know how to build a shopping cart and just need to learn how to do it in Rails.