Zed on Rails Follow-Up

Just finished listening to a decent podcast interview with Zed Shaw, author of Mongrel and the now infamous Rails is a Ghetto rant. I know some people are tired of hearing about Rails and/or Zed, but the interview provides a great prospective on a lot of what happened over the last month. Interesting points include:

• Zed claims the article was published prematurely
• To all the Rails haters who feel vidicated: “Yeah, but you guys still suck too.”
• Some level-headed anti-fan-boy advice
• Comments on the technical issues Ruby the Platform—io, threads, garbage collection
• Suggests Rubyists should skip 1.9 and put effort into Rubinius (and JRuby)
• Talks about Factor and other languages and frameworks he’s currently exploring

I’ve resisted the urge to comment on Zed’s rant and the following Rails backlash, but I’d like to go on record on a few points:

First, I think Zed had some great points, both in his rant and in this interview. Secondly, I completely agree that Ruby as a platform has serious issues and I think JRuby and Rubinius are Good Things. As for Rails, well, in certain respects it’s spoiled me. It’s hard to argue that Rails hasn’t changed how we think about web development and web frameworks. Deployment is still a major pain point, but for certain types of web apps, I’d still rather use Rails than anything else at the moment.

In fact, William and I will be running some Rails training here in Hong Kong in the next couple of months as part of a larger series of workshops on the latest and greatest in web development. And I admit, it’s difficult to do and promote this sort of training without getting caught in the hype and buzz, but I think we can find a balance by focusing on where Rails really shines and avoiding the temptation to trumpet a silver bullet.