You're Doing it Wrong

K, its not that I know the guy.  'Cause I've only seen him a couple times.  A lot of people are talking him up, saying how he's cool and fast and sweet.  But I just don't get it.  Seriously, from what I've seen, he just looks like another dork.

Anthropomorphism aside, I have yet to see anything about Ruby on Rails that makes me do anything other than yawn.  I haven't spent much time on it other than reading people's glowing reviews.  I have seen some code examples, which have done more to turn me off Ruby more than anything.  That and the fact that Ruby scales for shit due to the fact that it's a purely interpreted language.

This morning I just read a post over at FrankFi's blog "FrankFi's view of the world" about how Ruby differentiates between functions and variables.  I won't repost the code here--his entry is short and sweet so go over and read it.  What I will say is that the Ruby language doesn't require that functions without parameters be terminated with empty brackets--().  So the language can't tell the difference between a variable and a function without parameters.

This is fail.  Sorry, lovers of Ruby, you can't say that this won't result in freakish, hard to repro bugs that only show up on production servers.  And, if a developer was stupid enough to specifically use this "feautre", it would also result in hard to maintain, if not near impossible to maintain, code. 

This behavior is another black mark on Ruby in my books.  But still, I'm not saying that Ruby on Rails is 100% shit.  I'm just saying that if I'm ever going to be convinced that it isn't, somebody is gonna have to write an article called "What you're not getting about Ruby and why its the tits."

Programming Post by: McGurk at 01:08 PM | Reply
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