Comments on: Why am I learning this stuff? http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/ musings about electronic culture Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:02:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Mike http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-761 Thu, 02 Aug 2007 07:15:37 +0000 http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-761 Yeah, absolutely – and tbh the side of development which is all about ideas and prototyping is FAR more interesting (to me, anyway) than all that optimisation / cleaning it up / documentation stuff. Just as well I’m not a web developer. At least not at the moment…maybe I should keep quiet – who knows what the next job will hold…;-)

]]> By: Jeremy http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-720 Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:38:05 +0000 http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-720 I found you can make a career (well, a few years of emplyment so far, best not count my chickens) out of putting prototype-level code into production…
Seriously, thanks for your thoughts, Mike. I’m also hoping at some point to get around to installing and playing with all the Ruby stuff I downloaded, oh, months ago, if only because I want to understand what other people are using and talking about. I’ve never done this with, say, Java, but RoR is relatively fresh so perhaps I won’t be so far behind the curve. But in the end we aren’t going to be moving from ASP.Net any time soon so it’s only for my benefit, and I have a few other things to occupy my time. Ruby will have to wait, I think.

]]> By: Frankie Roberto http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-709 Mon, 30 Jul 2007 22:53:47 +0000 http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-709 This is an interesting comparison post: http://www.technogoggles.com/technogoggles/2007/02/language_and_th.html

]]> By: Mike http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-706 Mon, 30 Jul 2007 21:53:26 +0000 http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-706 Hey Paul. Yeah, that’s what I thought when I started my 2 weeks. The stuff that RoR does do – the scaffolding as one example or managing “migrations” as another – are awesome. Really incredibly powerful for rolling out quick applications. In fact I built an simple system years ago in ASP which, er, writes ASP out to the file system to do the “scaffold” thing because I realised you’d always need quick “web admin” access to db, and I’ve used it ever since – it’s interesting to see this is a common problem.

I guess it’s as much about my impatience as anything else. My “zero to A” time needs to be quicker than my “zero to application with ASP” time, which just simply isn’t ever going to happen. I was deeply impressed with what you could do with RoR straight away and *if I had the time* I’m sure I could probably save that time longer term. I just need instant gratification…

The production side of RoR is interesting. I’ve heard a load of people saying it’s REALLY slow for serious applications that are being pounded and .Net blows it away speed-wise. I dunno squit about PHP…

]]> By: Paul Walk http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-703 Mon, 30 Jul 2007 20:38:30 +0000 http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/2007/07/30/why-am-i-learning-this-stuff/#comment-703 Fascinating! Right up to the end I really thought you were going to conclude, as I (more or less) have that it was worth learning RoR because it made such a great, rapid prototyping framework….

I could draw a similar graph to yours, substituting Java for that weird Microsoft throwback that you use to build applications. Of course it might be the case that Java is slower and more cumbersome than VBScript/ASP to do prototyping work, hence my recognition that I really need Rails or something like it.

On a slightly related note, the barriers to actually deploying a *production* RoR application seem to remain quite high, compared to Perl/PHP for example.

Paul

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