RoR, Judge Judy, and little old ladies

[Robby]

Dave wrote:
> Robby wrote:
>>> - Are there any well defined studies suggesting that RoR developed 
>>> apps. are cheaper than, say, apps. developed with PHP, using a 
>>> traditional development approach?
>> More enterprise speak?
> 
> Guilty as charged <g> Unfortunately, no matter how promising and cool a 
> technology is many managers have to have a solid justification to try 
> something like RoR even for a smallish project. Heck - I don't blame the 
> managers - I'd have to have some solid justification to divert some of 
> my personal time over to learning RoR, because there's so much to keep 
> up with, and much of it ends up being nothing but a temporary phenom 
> (you mentioned Struts for example).
> 
Oh, I know all about managers *knowing more* :), so no worries, just 
didn't want to answer those questions if they were in that context. And 
I agree about a lot to keep up with, which actually falls somewhat 
inline with the current discussion, if you've taken D as a language of 
choice wouldn't you want to be able to work on the web stack with D 
itself? The thing is the web is *so* complicated that there is always 
going to be generational fads and improvements.
>>> - Is RoR here to stay?
>> I'd say the adoption and the momentum is going to keep it in swing for 
>> quite a while, how long? no clue.. I mean, back in the day Struts was 
>> the thing (bleh), and it's slowly becoming defunct. Can you be 
>> productive in RoR, sure, can you improve it? Sure, it's all about 
>> tastes.. but if you want something in the terms of an independent 
>> report on how great it is, I can't help. I've used it, it's worked for 
>> me on a quite large intranet application, but nothing is the be all 
>> end all.
>>
>>>
>>> Then I've got to ask: How could D possibly improve on RoR enough to 
>>> get people to move away from RoR to DeRailed?
>>>
>> It shouldn't be able moving people from, to d's implementation, it's 
>> about providing a strong stack of development tools to allow people 
>> who want to code in d on the client, on the server and indirectly, for 
>> the web.
> 
> You're right - but is DeRailed really what many of the talented [tango] 
> lib. developers should be working on (if they were so inclined to take 
> direction)?

I can't and won't speak for the Tango developers (I'm not one atm). 
However, one can assume that you can approach Tango as a toolkit, and 
considering that Mango's developers are also apart of Tango, so a 
toolkit for the web kinda makes sense.

Also, in my opinion the best part about trying to compete with 
technologies in problem domains allows you to open your eyes about some 
improvements that may help D as a whole. Consider some of the things 
that Ruby does to make it so easy, reflective abilities, dynamic 
generation and runtime type information.

Now obviously D isn't going to turn into a dynamic language, but 
exposing such traits that D could help a static typed langauge approach 
could help us all in the end. - such as runtime type information.