Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails

It's fascinating to read Giles Bowkett on Rails, its bloat, its falling out of fashion.

Fascinating mainly because it so clearly highlights that no-one is immune from this life-cycle that goes :

• new, simpler and easier than anything else
• hot-new thing that everyone loves
• adding more fluff to deal with more edge-cases
• build-up of technical debt
• re-writes to try to make more general, more principled, but requiring more configuration
• old and bloated.

Certainly Python isn't immune. We've been through this cycle with Zope, Plone ... feels like Django has too. Java went through it several times. The node/js/coffeescript frameworks will go through it too. 

DOS/Windows did it. I guess the Macintosh OS has, though Apple have been more willing to kill and reboot its operating systems with the moves to OSX (BSD) and then iOS.

Rails Off The Rails

Seems like the same thing has happened with Ruby on Rails as happened with, say, Zope.

Giles does a pretty good analysis. The key point is that as frameworks mature they start supporting legacy users and applications who, in turn, have different requirements and values from those looking for a quick way to build new applications.

Great talk on TDD, Ward Cunningham and what killed Smalltalk.

Follow on from yesterday's "Python / Haskell crossbreed" post. Both Al "Folknology" and Gleber point me at the Reia programming language. A Python / Ruby like scripting language on top of the Erlang Open Telecom Platform (Erlang's parallel virtual machine).

Very sweet ... I've subscribed to the mailing list to find out more.

Avi Bryant is working to bring Smalltalk scaling technology to Ruby on Rails.

Could Smalltalk / Ruby pretty-much merge with a common VM?

Ruby on Javascript VM?

Paul Graham's Arc Challenge . Examples in Lisp, Smalltalk Seaside, Ruby, Perl and Python (using generators instead of continuations)

And an Erlang response.