5 ms·

I don't think that Lerdorf (btw, not Lerforf) doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just saying that frameworks like Rails are inherently slower, and all

by cesare 17y ago

I don't think that Lerdorf (btw, not Lerforf) doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just saying that frameworks like Rails are inherently slower, and all the magic (like scaffolding etc.) isn't really worth it. He also says: > Ruby as a language is great, I think it's a really clean and nice language. There just aren't that many people who know it well.

benatkin 17y ago
Here's what he said: "But there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff, and they recognise that, which is why the new build will be better." Any rails dev could tell you that scaffolding is irrelevant to the performance of a typical rails app. Yet he mentions "scaffolding and stuff". Also, DHH has said numerous times that scaffolding is mostly just a development tool. I think people who still trot it out as one of the problems with Rails are deliberately ignoring what he said.
- jonknee 17y ago
  I think it's a fair knock because it is so prevalent in the screencast (which he mentioned). If it's in the sales pitch, it's fair to knock.
  - davidw 17y ago
    It's a bit like saying Ford cars are crap because they don't fly well. It's knocking the wrong thing.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      I don't follow... Ford doesn't sell their cars by showing how easy it is to make them fly.
      - davidw 17y ago
        Scaffolding does not make Rails fast or slow. It's code generation that happens prior to run time.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax. Seems pretty clear Mr. Lerdorf has very little knowledge of Rails, and likely very little interest in changing that. "But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'" Pretty sure that's true for people who hear good things about any [Perl|PHP|Python] framework and decide to pick it up. Usually people then just learn the language. PHP might have a brighter future if its BDFL wasn't so myopic about other languages.
    - jonknee 17y ago
      > "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax. Visit Ruby On Rails' homepage (http://rubyonrails.org/ http://rubyonrails.org/) and click "Screencasts" on the top menu bar. Click the first one, "Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Rails 2". Watch. That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to.
      - jamesbritt 17y ago
        " That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to." If that is as far as someone gets in trying to get an understanding of Rails, then they aren't even trying. What's disappointing is not that Mr. Lerdorf doesn't like Rails (though his reasoning could be better), but that he doesn't even seem interested in it or why people get so excited about it.
andrewvc 17y ago
I hope he sees the hypocrisy in being the creator of a slow (relative to Java/C) language which had a selling point of being productive and easy to use criticizing the next generation of web programming (frameworks) for having these exact same attributes compared to what he made. Also, the PHP framework world blows, I tried Zend's Framework, Cake, and Symfony when I had a boss that refused to use anything non-PHP, and they just don't have feature parity with Rails (though this was a year ago). They also don't have as many mature plugins available as Rails (and a web programming language lives and dies by its libraries).
- NathanKP 17y ago
  Comparing an interpreted langauge like PHP with C speedwise doesn't make any sense. Even Java is semi-compiled to an intermediate form unlike the strictly interpreted PHP. Also, in my experience there are plenty of libraries available for PHP. It comes with a lot more built in functionality than other languages. What I like about PHP over Ruby is that it has a more comfortable C-like syntax. In comparison Ruby is more like Basic than C. When I use Ruby I miss the simple curly braces of C or PHP. In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code.
  - benatkin 17y ago
    It makes sense in the context of PHP's creation. When PHP was created, web apps were still commonly written in C/C++. PHP is much older than Rails, even if you don't count PHP 1 or 2.
  - eru 17y ago
    > In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code. I also don't like Ruby's syntax in this regard. However I long for the simple ways of Haskell, Clean and Python here, using indentation.
  - andrewvc 17y ago
    Comparing a language like PHP to a framework like rails makes no sense either. That was my point.

by cesare 17y ago

benatkin 17y ago

Here's what he said: "But there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff, and they recognise that, which is why the new build will be better." Any rails dev could tell you that scaffolding is irrelevant to the performance of a typical rails app. Yet he mentions "scaffolding and stuff". Also, DHH has said numerous times that scaffolding is mostly just a development tool. I think people who still trot it out as one of the problems with Rails are deliberately ignoring what he said.

jonknee 17y ago
I think it's a fair knock because it is so prevalent in the screencast (which he mentioned). If it's in the sales pitch, it's fair to knock.
- davidw 17y ago
  It's a bit like saying Ford cars are crap because they don't fly well. It's knocking the wrong thing.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    I don't follow... Ford doesn't sell their cars by showing how easy it is to make them fly.
    - davidw 17y ago
      Scaffolding does not make Rails fast or slow. It's code generation that happens prior to run time.
- jamesbritt 17y ago
  "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax. Seems pretty clear Mr. Lerdorf has very little knowledge of Rails, and likely very little interest in changing that. "But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'" Pretty sure that's true for people who hear good things about any [Perl|PHP|Python] framework and decide to pick it up. Usually people then just learn the language. PHP might have a brighter future if its BDFL wasn't so myopic about other languages.
  - jonknee 17y ago
    > "The" screencast? Maybe in 2004 there was The One Rails Screencast, but their numbers are now legion. Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax. Visit Ruby On Rails' homepage (http://rubyonrails.org/ http://rubyonrails.org/) and click "Screencasts" on the top menu bar. Click the first one, "Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Rails 2". Watch. That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to.
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
      " That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to." If that is as far as someone gets in trying to get an understanding of Rails, then they aren't even trying. What's disappointing is not that Mr. Lerdorf doesn't like Rails (though his reasoning could be better), but that he doesn't even seem interested in it or why people get so excited about it.

andrewvc 17y ago

I hope he sees the hypocrisy in being the creator of a slow (relative to Java/C) language which had a selling point of being productive and easy to use criticizing the next generation of web programming (frameworks) for having these exact same attributes compared to what he made. Also, the PHP framework world blows, I tried Zend's Framework, Cake, and Symfony when I had a boss that refused to use anything non-PHP, and they just don't have feature parity with Rails (though this was a year ago). They also don't have as many mature plugins available as Rails (and a web programming language lives and dies by its libraries).

NathanKP 17y ago
Comparing an interpreted langauge like PHP with C speedwise doesn't make any sense. Even Java is semi-compiled to an intermediate form unlike the strictly interpreted PHP. Also, in my experience there are plenty of libraries available for PHP. It comes with a lot more built in functionality than other languages. What I like about PHP over Ruby is that it has a more comfortable C-like syntax. In comparison Ruby is more like Basic than C. When I use Ruby I miss the simple curly braces of C or PHP. In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code.
- benatkin 17y ago
  It makes sense in the context of PHP's creation. When PHP was created, web apps were still commonly written in C/C++. PHP is much older than Rails, even if you don't count PHP 1 or 2.
- eru 17y ago
  > In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code. I also don't like Ruby's syntax in this regard. However I long for the simple ways of Haskell, Clean and Python here, using indentation.
- andrewvc 17y ago
  Comparing a language like PHP to a framework like rails makes no sense either. That was my point.