kuniklo

This: http://moc.daper.net/

Is a great console music player.

I'd do it.

The minute you have to start working with designers HAML is a no-go.

It's the old worse is better thing all over again: http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

Maybe all the "better" languages are a case of misdirected optimization, where the critical resource is developer time?

Phase 4, "Winter": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West#Phases_of_r...

The big difference here is that when Rails came out it solved a real problem. Every other popular web technology at the time was much, much harder to use and slower to develop in. Since then it's acquired some inevitable complexity but most of that was in response to somebody's need for a feature. Merb will accumulate the same complexity if it's successful.

To me this just sounds like Common Lisp vs Scheme all over again.

The fact that there is a full-stack version available doesn't mitigate the fact that the multitudes of custom stacks out there are going to mean two bad things:

1. The default full stack will be a lot less thoroughly documented, tested and debugged because a lot fewer people are using it.

2. The chances that I can just jump in and start hacking productively on somebody else's Merb app are slim because it's likely I'm not familiar with some of the components you're using.

I still don't understand at all why I'd want to use Merb. What problem are you trying to solve here? Being slightly better than Rails in a few respects isn't even close to good enough to compensate for the lack of documentation, code maturity, available programming expertise, public success stories etc that Rails has going for it.

I just don't get the appeal of Merb at all. Rails was such a relief after a few years of roll-your-own--web-stack Java. Why would I want to go back to dealing with all the little incompatibilities and bugs that creep in once you start mixing and matching pieces to build your own stack?

Apple makes some great stuff but I've been feeling more and more lately that I'd rather spend my time and money supporting open standards.

I haven't found this to be the case at all. Who besides Zed is behaving this way?

I don't see how that follows at all. If the biggest issues with Ruby are performance and memory management how does changing the language spec help fix that? If anything a stable language spec should help nail down the bugs in the engine.

It would be nice to see some progress made on the interpreter but I think it's to Ruby's credit that the language design hasn't changed that much in the last several years. A lot of the activity on the Python side has been fixing things that weren't well thought through in the first place.

I wonder if it's occurred to Zed that his attitude might have had something to do with his difficulty finding a job.

We build a small, versioned depot of ruby + rails and other gems. Running this with Apache/mod_fcgid works really well and is very stable.

You're right that Rails expects you to take the whole stack and doesn't offer you choice. DHH and I consider that to be a huge advantage but it also means that Rails won't be a good fit for every project.

That said, I don't see anything in Merb that would tempt me away from Rails for new projects.

Hopefully it won't be a war but it certainly is Merb versus Rails, at least if you're deciding what framework to build your website with.

I'd be interested to hear you elaborate on this a bit. I've build quite a few Rails apps so far and haven't found that to be the case myself.

You're never going to love every decision made by the designers of any platform. The thing is, you're likely to make just as many missteps on your own. Every once in a while it's worth it to start with a clean slate but I don't think Rails is even close to that point yet.

I don't get it. One of the best things about Rails is that I don't have to pick and choose my components. I use what everybody else is using and I know that means it's likely to work and be reasonably well documented. Any small gains I might achieve by swapping out one layer of Rails are going to be more than offset by the extra complexity of my unique Merb environment.

DHH's arguments about "opinionated" software seem to have been lost on the Merb crowd.

Let's save the political stuff for reddit.

Yeah. The irony is that server-side frameworks really started to get good just before most of their functionality migrated back to the client.

Sounds like Scheme and Common Lisp all over again. Every popular framework eventually gets complicated and tempts us to do a "clean slate" rewrite.

Rails succeeded because it's opinionated. I don't want to choose from five different ORM layers. I want one that works.

Nice to see Wired dialing back up the naive techno-triumphalism. How long until the next bubble bursts?

Change the dates on this thread from 2008 to anything from 2000-2007 and you can find a thousand other threads just like it on c.l.l.

The short answer - don't hold your breath.