From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-10-09T09:22:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Rails

Giles Bowkett wrote:
> My question may be too philosophical to have a useful answer. You
> **could** write Rails in assembly if you really wanted to. The link
> between a language and frameworks written in it may be too subtle to
> draw useful conclusions from.

I'm not sure how DHH and the original Rails team came to the decision to
extract Rails from BaseCamp and release it as an open source project.
Perhaps that's documented somewhere, but I personally haven't heard that
story.

But that's in fact what happened. DHH and his team built BaseCamp in
Ruby, using the tools available to them at the time. At some point, the
underlying components -- ActiveRecord, ActionPack, etc. -- were
extracted/abstracted/factored from BaseCamp and released as Ruby on
Rails. In any event, BaseCamp, Ruby, the early versions of Rails, DHH
and his team are probably inextricably intertwined.

But now, as an open source project with a much larger community, Rails
could very well evolve away from Ruby, although I don't know what
advantage there would be in that.Interestingly enough, Rails seems to be
Ruby's "killer app", but I don't know that *Rails* has -- or will ever
have -- a killer app of its own. :)

But it's all C under the hood, you know. :)