2008-02-11

Love Ruby, Hate Rails?

Fairly recently I read a post (and listened to a podcast) decrying the Ruby on Rails community. A couple weeks ago I was talking to th dev crew of a company a buddy works at, and they seemed to wince when I mentioned that I do nearly all of my scripting now in Ruby. It became obvious quickly that it was because they had some bad experience with Rails. They obviously, as I've learned many people do, think that Ruby is synonymous with Rails and I find that unfortunate. I don't think my point came across that I use Ruby the scripting language, not Rails the framework. I've played with Rails but not enough to truly hate it. I remember liking it actually but then again I'm not a web developer and don't know what to complain about. I have little doubts that Zed is correct in his criticisms of Rails itself, not to mention the Rails community.

Still, I'm a little disheartened that that by all accounts the fate of Ruby is tied to Rails. Rails certainly did put Ruby on the radar (similarly to how Lua seems popular because of WoW) and that is a good thing, but the backlash could make it a bad thing. My only hope is that all that is wrong with Rails gets fixed in time. Well, I care less about Rails since I don't use it; I'm more concerned with the thriving of Ruby which has its own problems that I hope get fixed. I'd be sad if I were really forced to fully go back to Python or Perl.

Time decimation

Alas, it has been over a year since my single post just over a year ago.

As it turns out, last year was just a mess overall and since no-one reads this it doesn't matter anyways. When I re-read my last post, on quitting WoW I had to laugh because a couple months ago I let some coworkers talk me into playing again. I'm doomed.

So I start up on yet another server from scratch but with some starting funds and get busy trying to catch up to my coworkers (still a long way to go). Just this weekend for no good reason I logged onto some of my previous servers noting that I still had characters from a year ago there. As I inspected them I realize that I didn't really know what I was doing back then. I hadn't even used any talent points. Well things tend to make more sense the second time around. Again for no good reason, I spent a little time cleaning some of those chars up knowing that they probably won't get much play time.

Ah well, enough of that. Let's see how long this lasts.