Thank you, Jason Fried
Steven was speaking in Rhode Island yesterday to a group that included Jason Fried, the co-creator of Rails. Here’s a picture of him giving me encouragement.*
* Christian and I work together very closely on outside.in, and the co-nickname that we were given is “the Chronic”. I think I started this when I christened Hillary and Phil, our two lead editors, as Phillary for convenience.
I was going to take this opportunity to address Derek Sivers’ post maligning Rails in favor of PHP, but I’m still digesting my thoughts on that issue (time I’ve spent working with Rails to working with PHP is about 1:10). I will say that he’s right about Rails not being a magical answer to code/architecture problems. There aren’t any silver bullets out there, although that won’t stop people from looking for them. If you make any platform/framework/language/database change and think that just by virtue of having made the change you’ll automatically improve performance/features/etc., you’ll be disappointed. That’s the wrong way to go about things.
However, I totally disagree with his comments about Rails making him contort the code to adapt to its ways. Rails does enforce a lot of MVC rules, but I have found very few places where recreating pages in Rails didn’t make things simpler and easier to code. I wish Derek would give some specific examples of things that he was trying to do in Rails that were much easier in PHP.
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