On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 12:26 AM, Ben Schwarz <[email protected]> wrote:

My slides (with audio, thanks to Josh Basset!) are online
http://www.slideshare.net/benschwarz/why-haml-sucks-or-why-you-should-think-before-choosing-haml-for-your-next-project

Awesome. Is your next preso on "Why Ruby Sucks or Why You Should Think
Before Choosing Ruby for Your Next Project". Honestly people should just
learn to write better PHP.

Seriously though, here's how I think about HAML (and language quality in
general): If you randomly pick a line (or even a short string) from a file,
what are the chances that piece will contain a *contextually relevant* chunk
of information and not just some boilerplate that's there to help the
computer process the data.

There's something that's built into our psychology that tends to associate a
good visual helping of metadata with "work" and "quality". This story came
up on hackernews recently[1] that's kind of cheesy but illustrates the point
well. I know the feeling, I'm guilty of this myself. For the longest time
typing this:

  <style type="text/css"></style>

Just Felt Right.

The part of my brain that appreciates "correctness" just overruled the part
that said "there's only on style language the browser actually understands
and it's going to be like that for a very long time and even when it's not
that new style language will probably still have a mime-type with a
preceding 'text/' ... and even when we're embedding a fancy new style
language that is not text (not sure what this would even look like, base64?)
then the browser will probably still try to detect CSS first because it
makes logical sense to do so".

You have to conquer this part of brain, the part that sees an XML document
that is 90% tags and thinks "I wonder if this validates" rather than
"Where's the signal". Progress depends on it. HAML is the right direction.

-- Myles


[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677655

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