jutopia

Hearing something like this makes me happy I jumped the Rails band wagon.

There’s a mix of forces in play here. First of all there’s some very powerful technology. In Ruby you can re-open any class and “monkey patch” it, that is change whatever’s going on inside it. (“Monkey patching” is a phrase coined by Pythonistas, definitely derrogatory, I’m expecting it to become a phrase in the Ruby community too, definitely not derrogatory.)

This is a very powerful feature of Ruby and with all great power comes great responsibility. In the hands of the wrong people this could go “k

Bill Roth (BEA manager of something) blogs about SCA:

What is SCA?
SCA is a specification that allows developers to focus on writing business logic.

Pfhahahahaha!!

I’m almost falling of my chair. How many times have I seen this or that technology touted with those words? And the result always being a much bigger mess than it was before. COBOL was one, and I’m telling you the ratio of business logic to cruft in the millions of lines of COBOL out there is embarrassingly low. Then came the 4GLs, and well, anyone that had to maintain an Oracle Forms or PowerBuilder app knows that it sure isn’t just about business logic. EJB was also sold this way, and we all know what happened to that.

Then it got me thinking…

Despite the vast amount of historical evidence, why is it so damn hard to get this right? There’s something to this insightful article by Nat Pryce. There is so much complexity in software relating to fighting paradigms, a patchwork of differing technologies, crufty code hacked together 3am before an important demo. I just love Nat’s parallel to modern day London. I used to live at one end of Bishopsgate in the City of London. Just walking the ten minutes down the street to London Bridge would expose you to neo-classical buildings, the odd surviving victorian (I lived in one), art deco, 21st century glass and brushed steel skyscrapers. With you walking would be Sikhs in their turbans, blonde (and drunk) scandinavians, moslem women in burkas, machissimo italians, gay couples (excuse the stereotypes, I think you get my point).

London may not be beautiful in the classical sense of the word, but there is certainly something very special about it.

Maybe it’s the same with software…?

Anyone that builds Rails apps should read this blog.

I think this is a great development in the community. Any technology suffers from performance problems and Ruby/Rails is very much not an exception. Performance problems are attacked from two different fronts. First of all the performance problems gets fixed in the underlying technology, there’s been a lot of work on this partly in Rails and partly by redesigning the Ruby core infrastructure (which is lightyears behind Java at the moment). At the same time this happens the community starts establishing best practices to work around performance problems. I’m very happy that latter has started happening in the Ruby/Rails community now. Certainly a benefit we’re getting from the fact that the community has grown several-folds the last year.