Comments on: Ruby on Rails: First Impressions

By: pete

pete — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:34:57 +0000

Maybe check out http://heroku.com for Potion Store deployment!

By: mr_noodle

mr_noodle — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:35:12 +0000

Thanks for the comments. As for the language, I have a strong distaste for Perl so anything that strives to emulate its syntax lowers my respect for it. Ruby’s syntax is not so bad that I want to gouge my eyes out but I do find it hard to decipher at times (at least harder than it has to be). Yes, I’m sure I’ll get used to it but, by contrast, I’ve only written like two Python scripts in my life and I can probably decipher Python code easier than a Ruby one on first glance.

There are a lot of great things in the language but I feel that it stumbled on syntax. While I can appreciate all the cool things underneath, I still have to read and write the code.

Oh, and does it seem odd that Ruby doesn’t have decent built-in Unicode support? Given that the creator is Japanese, you’d think that Unicode would have been a higher priority.

By: kenneth

kenneth — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 13:00:25 +0000

Totally agree with you… the main thing I noticed about RoR is that it’s great, but deployment on a production server totally SUCKS… Especially without cap!

By: Joachim Bengtsson

Joachim Bengtsson — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:50:17 +0000

Like archie4oz, I’d definitely say,
Ruby: oh sweet goodness! Is there anything more beautiful?
Rails: Meh. Immature even after a few years of mega-hype.

I like a lot of the thinking in Rails (convention over configuration, e g), but the implementation is severely lacking. Single-threaded? Triple-ouch. And deployment is always a pain.

The book is great though, as you say, also as an intro to Ruby.

By: Manton Reece

Manton Reece — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:13:12 +0000

Thanks for writing up your experience. A lot of people come to Ruby because of Rails and end up falling in love with the language, but I’m probably not one of those people either. I love the clean syntax and power that comes with how dynamic it is though.

I’d like to believe that one day the deployment issues will be sorted out, but it’s a hard problem to solve because of how Rails was designed. Maybe one day.

By: archie4oz

archie4oz — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:31:50 +0000

Personally I think you got it backwards (Rails: meh, Ruby: Great), but that’s just my opinion. Merb addresses my gripes w/Rails, alas it would probably be more work that it’s worth to migrate Potion Store running on it.