[LRUG] What will the post-Rails contraction be ?

[Tom Stuart]

On 19 February 2013 21:22, Stephen Masters <stephen.masters at me.com> wrote:

> If he had stayed away from Rails, and stuck with just Ruby, then it might have made more sense. i.e.
>
> Assembly
>   -> FORTRAN
>     -> Lisp (Functional Programming)
>       -> Algol 68 / C (Structured Programming)
>         -> C++ (make C safer by merging Structured programming with OO)
>           -> Java (make C++ safer by enforcing OO (mostly), and removing pointers)
>             -> Ruby (make dev easier/faster by removing the safety harness of static typing)
>               -> Clojure / Scala / F# (maybe static typing wasn't so bad, but we'll claim it's because we want to do multi-core more efficiently)
>

Even then, this would only be a version of history. You could paint a
very different picture and draw very different conclusions if only you
replaced C++ with Smalltalk, for example.

I agree strongly that this is purely a talk about fashions in
programming. This is something Gary's not making clear enough, and
he's also not making it clear enough that Rails has a 'culture of
brokenness' almost entirely for cultural reasons rather than as a
logical conclusion of aspects of the language or framework. There's
nothing in Java which logically leads to service-oriented
architectures making use of inversion of control containers, and
there's nothing in Ruby which logically leads to tightly-integrated
systems.

Which is not to say that there are not *aspects* of both languages
which might set developers on a path of thinking *toward* these
logical conclusions. I just think it would be a stretch to say that
these aspects outweigh characteristics of the culture, and that Gary
doesn't even try to establish that argument.