Hi everyone,
Good meeting yesterday with Ian; we're planning a relaunch of SneakyFeelings.com in January with a renewed focus on events and singles nights. Right now he's laying the groundwork for this, and I'm busting my butt getting StevesLeads.com finished so I can get a new source of working capital. It's nice to have a partner! Things happen and I'm not the one doing them. :)
Speaking of SL, that's coming along nicely. It's implemented using that "hot" new programming framework, Ruby On Rails. As much as I love the goodness of the code, I know I would be much faster sticking with PHP rather than learning a new language and framework for the purposes of a single project. I'm a little conflicted about it.
Programmers are funny people. Much like physicists, I think most of us (at least the ones who care about more than earning a paycheck) harbor the belief that there can be a single formula for describing anything. The problem is in finding that formula. There are always new languages popping up, and vendors often hail them as the one that fixes all problems. It gets really humorous when someone changes their tune and says, "No wait. We specialize. We don't solve all problems, just the one of making websites." This specialization is bogus, since websites are merely a presentation layer for an arbitrarily complex software system. Sure, maybe your framework makes submitting a form look pretty, and maybe it can map a database table to a language object. What makes an application valuable, however, is all the hard stuff which can't be easily adapted into a paradigm. If a developer doesn't push technology in a new direction and use the language/framework for something other than what the original creator thought it could be used for, she isn't really contributing anything to the world. There, I said it.
It is in this category that Rails fits. I have to say that the guys behind it do not brag and hail themselves as the be-all-end-all of development frameworks. The computer press has done that for them. What they have created as a very good system that makes simple sites simple to make, and harder sites moderately easier to make. I can only say moderately since the sheer elegance of the Ruby language is offset by the fact that it is only now getting a third-party community, and many of the constructs people are used to having in an API are still being created. In addition, most problems in the Java and PHP worlds can be solved by Googling an error message. Ruby, as I found out this weekend, isn't there yet. Scripting languages are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot (since so much stuff is created on the fly, and types are fluid, etc) and this lack of a web presence is challenging. As I become more familiar with the tools available it will get easier, but still.
After StevesLeads, I will jump back to PHP to knock out my next few projects. Since my sites are all maintanence-free, the syntactic ugliness shouldn't be an issue. Perhaps I will jump back to Ruby once 18th Street has some more mouths to feed; it seems an ideal system for a team environment.
Til next time.
Good meeting yesterday with Ian; we're planning a relaunch of SneakyFeelings.com in January with a renewed focus on events and singles nights. Right now he's laying the groundwork for this, and I'm busting my butt getting StevesLeads.com finished so I can get a new source of working capital. It's nice to have a partner! Things happen and I'm not the one doing them. :)
Speaking of SL, that's coming along nicely. It's implemented using that "hot" new programming framework, Ruby On Rails. As much as I love the goodness of the code, I know I would be much faster sticking with PHP rather than learning a new language and framework for the purposes of a single project. I'm a little conflicted about it.
Programmers are funny people. Much like physicists, I think most of us (at least the ones who care about more than earning a paycheck) harbor the belief that there can be a single formula for describing anything. The problem is in finding that formula. There are always new languages popping up, and vendors often hail them as the one that fixes all problems. It gets really humorous when someone changes their tune and says, "No wait. We specialize. We don't solve all problems, just the one of making websites." This specialization is bogus, since websites are merely a presentation layer for an arbitrarily complex software system. Sure, maybe your framework makes submitting a form look pretty, and maybe it can map a database table to a language object. What makes an application valuable, however, is all the hard stuff which can't be easily adapted into a paradigm. If a developer doesn't push technology in a new direction and use the language/framework for something other than what the original creator thought it could be used for, she isn't really contributing anything to the world. There, I said it.
It is in this category that Rails fits. I have to say that the guys behind it do not brag and hail themselves as the be-all-end-all of development frameworks. The computer press has done that for them. What they have created as a very good system that makes simple sites simple to make, and harder sites moderately easier to make. I can only say moderately since the sheer elegance of the Ruby language is offset by the fact that it is only now getting a third-party community, and many of the constructs people are used to having in an API are still being created. In addition, most problems in the Java and PHP worlds can be solved by Googling an error message. Ruby, as I found out this weekend, isn't there yet. Scripting languages are notoriously difficult to troubleshoot (since so much stuff is created on the fly, and types are fluid, etc) and this lack of a web presence is challenging. As I become more familiar with the tools available it will get easier, but still.
After StevesLeads, I will jump back to PHP to knock out my next few projects. Since my sites are all maintanence-free, the syntactic ugliness shouldn't be an issue. Perhaps I will jump back to Ruby once 18th Street has some more mouths to feed; it seems an ideal system for a team environment.
Til next time.
posted by Mike at
5:42 AM
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