On Mar 6, 5:28 pm, David Pollak <feeder.of.the.be...@gmail.com> wrote: > Back in 2005-2006 Ruby and Rails were not easy to > get started with.
My first Rails checkins in our VCS are from 2004. I had no trouble at all getting things running back then and don't remember hearing a lot of complaints about this from other quarters either but I do remember that getting a lot of Unix-y software to build on Macs at the time was a real bitch so that may have been a factor in your experience. > DHH promoted Rails too early in my opinion. VeriSign adopted Rails for some > projects and after deploying those projects and then paying Zed Shaw to > write Mongrel, VeriSign dumped Rails. Reasonable people could disagree about this. Who knows. I think if you've got a hardcover book out on Lift though the horse has left the gate. > Another failing of Rails is the community. The Rails community is a > significant detractor to adoption outside of the young hip kids. I wish I could disagree with you about this. > The way you come across is "whatever isn't Rails is bad and everything that > is Maven is bad." It will never be my goal to convince folks with that kind > of mind set to use Lift. That's not where I'm coming from at all. I have a lot of misgivings about the direction Ruby and Rails are taking. In fact it's the reason I've been dabbling with a lot of alternatives lately. There are a bunch of architectural decisions in Rails I've never been happy about. > You did not discuss Lift's Ajax stuff in your review. Instead of having to > change 2 or 3 files for each Ajax request as in Rails, you only need change > 1. I ran out of steam before really getting into that stuff and I have some very bad associations left over from RJS with server-side shortcut syntax for AJAX but I'd have to take a closer look at what Lift is doing. > At this point, I see this as a feature. Anyone who is going to evaluate > Lift purely on the looks of the HTML on the getting started guide, is not > likely to fit into the community. This may seem like a jerky thing to say > and may seem like it feeds into your concern about the anti-marketing > functional language folks. It's not. I'd prefer people who will do some > substantive evaluation of Lift... maybe spend a whole day on it rather than > simply looking at the docs and say, "these guys can't make it pretty... they > must be morons." I think you're making a common programmer's mistake of assuming the people that value aesthetics aren't capable of making deeper distinctions. The working web programmer that wants to move beyond Rails/Django/PHP has a ton of options right now and is much more likely to pick something that looks polished and ready to use and not like yet another impractical academic exercise. If your intent is to scare people like that away you're probably succeeding but that also means that people like that aren't trying Lift out on little test sites, then bigger sites, then selling it to management and adding to your list of success stories. Who knows, maybe your strategy of growing Lift top-down with the eggheads will pay off. TBH it sounds disturbingly reminiscent of the kind of ivory tower arguments I've heard functional programming apologists make for many years now. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
