Re: FN-FORUM: What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 20th November 2007 09:58



Carrie wrote:
>
>
> I will take another look when I have the time,
> but I am very cynical these days,
> I have the tools at my fingertips to fulfill the jobs I tend to be
> offered, Ruby and or Rails do not offer me any performance advatage
> (in my clients terms)
> or any advantage in developer cycles - I have snippets of just about
> everything I need - and I quite enjoy creating new ones.
>
> The people I work with tend not to need anything fancy, but they
> *allways* need something completely different from the last lot.
>
> If you could convince me that the stuff I have already, which is
> direct and eficient, and covers most of the needs of my clients, (and
> only needs a search and replace to convert to a new client.)
> should be replaced, involving another vertical learning curve
> (pass me the crampons!)
From the toolset you have you probably don't need anything else- you
will probably never need to learn another language again. That doesn't
mean it's not worth doing. Every time I learn a new language the things
I take from it go back and inform how I use all the others and for that
alone I find it's worth continuing to learn new things just to keep my
brain in gear. In "The Pragmatic Programmer" - probably the best book on
our craft yet written - they recommend learning a new programming
language every year.

Ruby is great in that it has almost no learning curve, it just gets out
of the way and lets you write the code you need to. Really pleasant to
work with. As for Rails, I think there is something to be said for it
that everyone who has used it immediately goes to replicate it on their
favourite platform, just because it has so many fantastic ideas in
there. Nothing that nobody else couldn't have thought of, but stuff that
when it's put together just makes sense.