3 ms·

in short no, the thing that made vb popular was it RAD stuff. Ruby on its own does not have windowing etc. Then again maybe it is when you look at the uptake of

in short no, the thing that made vb popular was it RAD stuff. Ruby on its own does not have windowing etc. Then again maybe it is when you look at the uptake of it. I still think people miss the point of vb and get far to elitist about whatever their fav language. why would I write a 5000 line C program when I could do it in a 1000 a lot quicker? If the end result is the same nothing is lost by doing it in vb. I live by use the best tool for the job.

michaelneale 19y ago
Whilst no IDE style tooling, rails is kind of a "RAD" (non visual) tool for classic style web apps. What with all the scaffolding and only writing the minimal code to deal with actions etc. So perhaps rails is the new VB would be more fair.
- qaexl 19y ago
  I've been writing Rails apps for a while. While I still use scaffolding, I almost always start changing them after I generate it it. A lot of the better Rails dev on #rubyonrails write their stuff from scratch. People who want to take scaffolding to something more capable usually use a plugin such as ActiveScaffold. If you want to point to anything "RAD" in Rails, it is the ActiveRecord ORM, and more recently, the RESTful controllers. Hanging out on #rubyonrails, there are a lot of Rails newcomers who come into the channel with little or no programming background, or those that do, come in without having first learned Ruby. They expect to be able to have Rails do the work for them, but Rails doesn't replace the need for a programmer to be able to think. Even a highly expressive language will have difficulty helping someone who has nothing to express.
  - michaelneale 19y ago
    sounds a bit similar to VB - although of course it was (deliberately) a far less capable language, it still had the same issue of people expecting just to sprinkle a "little code" behind the scenes and have it work. My (distant) memory of most RAD tools of the 90s was similar to scaffolding - in some cases it could get you started but for any reasonable app, you tended to build stuff up by hand or dynamically etc. I still think it bears a lot of similarity. Now with Sun and MS "blessing" ruby as a glue language, it seems even more likely to follow a similar path, for better and worse.
    - qaexl 19y ago
      Maybe so. I'm fully anticipating the day when an entire generation of non-US kids who grew up with the OLPC XO, and expect Python and Squeak to be in "grown up" computers. Ruby is like a Japanese stone garden or a bonsai tree. Maybe it'll stay weird and Japanese enough to keep the tourists from stumbling in drunk, late at night.

michaelneale 19y ago

Whilst no IDE style tooling, rails is kind of a "RAD" (non visual) tool for classic style web apps. What with all the scaffolding and only writing the minimal code to deal with actions etc. So perhaps rails is the new VB would be more fair.

qaexl 19y ago
I've been writing Rails apps for a while. While I still use scaffolding, I almost always start changing them after I generate it it. A lot of the better Rails dev on #rubyonrails write their stuff from scratch. People who want to take scaffolding to something more capable usually use a plugin such as ActiveScaffold. If you want to point to anything "RAD" in Rails, it is the ActiveRecord ORM, and more recently, the RESTful controllers. Hanging out on #rubyonrails, there are a lot of Rails newcomers who come into the channel with little or no programming background, or those that do, come in without having first learned Ruby. They expect to be able to have Rails do the work for them, but Rails doesn't replace the need for a programmer to be able to think. Even a highly expressive language will have difficulty helping someone who has nothing to express.
- michaelneale 19y ago
  sounds a bit similar to VB - although of course it was (deliberately) a far less capable language, it still had the same issue of people expecting just to sprinkle a "little code" behind the scenes and have it work. My (distant) memory of most RAD tools of the 90s was similar to scaffolding - in some cases it could get you started but for any reasonable app, you tended to build stuff up by hand or dynamically etc. I still think it bears a lot of similarity. Now with Sun and MS "blessing" ruby as a glue language, it seems even more likely to follow a similar path, for better and worse.
  - qaexl 19y ago
    Maybe so. I'm fully anticipating the day when an entire generation of non-US kids who grew up with the OLPC XO, and expect Python and Squeak to be in "grown up" computers. Ruby is like a Japanese stone garden or a bonsai tree. Maybe it'll stay weird and Japanese enough to keep the tourists from stumbling in drunk, late at night.