Ruby and Rails

Posted on Friday January 19, 2007 by Julian I. Kamil

This past week I got to learn Rails as part of a project that I am involved in. My impression: Rails is beautiful. It makes database-backed, web application programming a lovely thing to do. I cannot find better words to describe it than to quote Giorgio Armani:

“Think of Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface when she comes down the stairs in that gold dress – I fell in love with her at that particular moment.”

Well, if Rails is like Michelle Pfeiffer in that gold dress, then let me tell you something else: Ruby is like Michelle Pfeiffer — naked.

I am saying this because I found out you don’t really need to learn a lot of Ruby up front to be able to write a functional web application with Rails. And for many budding Rails developers, this — not knowing a lot of Ruby — is usually the case. For me, it happens to be the other way around. I’ve done about a year of pure Ruby development before getting a chance to work on a paid project with Rails. So, I noticed that Rails makes it really easy to write web applications without requiring any considerable amount of Ruby understanding.

Is this good, or bad?

I suppose it could be both. Rails is like this beautiful cover that can be undone to reveal an even more beautiful thing underneath. This is why I reject the idea that another web application framework that replicates all of Rails features in another programming language — say Java, or PHP — can be as compelling a proposition and be fun to be working with. Once you get into more serious programming with it, you would have to get underneath the covers, and experience the unbeauty of the implementation language. I am saying this with confidence because I have experienced serious Java, PHP, and Ruby programming, among others. Ruby is the one I love to deal with under the sheet.

So in a way, getting people to be interested in Ruby through Rails is a good thing.

Unfortunately, some people I’ve met and talked to — smart people, too, I should add — never got to that point because they saw this beautiful outer layer, examined it, and decided that it was just another clever implementation of the MVC pattern, and nothing more. They think of Rails as a fashion artifact that will pop and go away as fast as another Britney tune.

This is bad, because they did not get to experience the real soul of the framework.

It is like seeing a beautiful girl in a beautiful dress passing by and saying that she must be rotten inside.

I say, you really need to examine her further and get to know her at a deeper level. Then, and only then, can you make an informed judgment.

I did, and I simply love Ruby. And Rails, too.

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