If you’ve been following the usual programmer and tech new sites, you’ve probably read (or at least heard of) Zed Shaw’s rant, titled Rails is a Ghetto. If you haven’t read it yet, go there now, give it a quick read and come back. I can wait.
High-spirited stuff, isn’t it? As you might expect, there have been a number of interesting responses to Zed’s polemic, but only one made me laugh out loud — it’s this entry in Jesse Stay’s blog:
Ruby on Rails is weak right now, it’s breaking apart from the inside. Now is the time for the Perl community to show its strength and unite in an effort to make Perl once again the most used platform on the web!
Perhaps it’s time for Larry Wall to update his maxim about the great virtues of a programmer: it should now be laziness, impatience, hubris and revenge fantasies.
0 replies on ““Now, While Rails is Weak, We Must Strike!””
Catalyst already beats Rails.
@Gavin: If it works for you, more power to you. Perl in its current form drives me bonkers, so I’m afraid Catalyst isn’t for me.
(Now if and when Perl 6 — which from Damian Conway’s presentations looks like it won’t drive me bonkers — comes out and Catalyst gets implemented in it, we’ll talk.)
In case any of you readers were wondering about the Catalyst framework, you can find out more at its official website.
Joey, you have a great attitude (and I love the graphic). Playing Devil’s advocate I must point out that since Perl 6 will run Perl 5, Catalyst is already implemented in it, as it were. Some of the new code in 5.10 (and I think it will be use for 6) for method resolution order came out of the Catalyst project. It really is awesome.
Strangely enough I came to Catalyst instead of Rails because two years ago when I tried to pick up Rails the tutorials would not run on my box. So instead of spending the weekend debugging a simple installation procedure, I installed Catalyst and had a demo application running in 30 seconds.
Also, Jese is being goofy. It’s not a competition, it’s an ecosystem. And Ruby never took the web away from Perl. That was PHP and it did it by more or less being a partial copy of Perl 4 plus 600 new keywords to replace the need to know or use the CPAN.
Catalyst+DBIx::Class already put RoR+ActiveRecord into shame, making them look just ridiculous baby toys. No need for any revenge. Just ruth. (Though admittedly, any Python framework is even worse).
Ah, one last thing: using a Java-like case for your name is just wrong: originally it probably was “De Villa” (if really you don’t like it, use an underscore instead: “de_villa”).
Learn Perl, it’s never too late.
Cheers.
@Phab: Actually, the pedantically correct way to spell it is “de Villa”. Trust me, I’m the domain expert in this instance.
As for Perl, when version 6 comes out, I’ll give it a serious look. As I mentioned in an earlier comment, while the current incarnations of Perl aren’t my thing, the language features in 6.0 that I saw in Damian Conway’s presentation in the summer of 2006 impressed me.
There’s also a pragmatic consideration: my current job — which pays quite well — involves Ruby and not Perl.
[…] appears I’ve caused quite a stir in my post about asking Perl to step up. Joey DeVilla on Global Nerdy thinks I’m funny. Several Perl users, including Andy Lester (author of […]