Simply Shankar

I’ve finally gotten around to building my first real application using Ruby on Rails – had done a quick walk through a while back, but now I’m doing it at a pace that allows me to go deep. Very impressed by the amount of experience and knowledge that has gone into the framework. Frameworks typically have a learning curve associated with them and RoR is no exception. Couple of good books I’d recommend to anyone wanting to do anything serious with Ruby/RoR are:

• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers Guide by Dave Thomas et. al.
• Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas et. al.

So what’s this got to do with the title of my post? Over my years as a programmer, I’ve seen a lot of intense debate around languages and frameworks – how one is better or worse than the other (a popular debate raging these past couple of years has been around RoR versus Java/J2EE). To me, its all about the purpose. Languages and frameworks are typically optimized for a specific set of use cases. In RoR’s case, this turns out to be database based web applications built for the web in its current state of maturity.

As a good programmer, one needs to keep abreast of what’s happening in terms of language and framework development and select the best available ones for a given task at hand. Yes, this requires an open mind and lot of extra learning and work – but we owe it to ourselves and the people who pay us and rely on us to make decisions for them. There is nothing that bothers me more than the programmer who follows the “I have a hammer, so everything looks like a nail” school of thought …

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 4:41 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.