From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-10-08T06:23:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Rails

Hal Fulton wrote:
> 
> No, I disagree. Most or many of the copycats are inferior to Rails
> because the underlying language is less expressive (or less dynamic).
> 
> An exception might be Python, which is probably the closest to Ruby
> of all the languages that have Rails clones.

I don't know about other Python web app frameworks, but I don't think
it's fair to classify Django as a "Rails clone" or "copycat". Django and
Rails were developed independently more or less at the same time. And
they were both abstracted from different web apps. As a consequence,
there are some things that Django does well and Rails does poorly, and
vice versa.


I'm not at all sure the concepts of "expressive" or "dynamic" are the
real reasons Ruby programmers prefer Ruby to other languages. I think
its more that Ruby was a true object-oriented *programming language*
from birth, rather than having objects grafted on to what was
essentially a glorified UNIX shell with lots of C libraries. Early Perl
scripts, for example, looked a lot like cleaned-up C shell or Korn shell
scripts that used "grep", "sed", "awk", etc. to do the work.