Ruby on Fails
or, Don’t Toy with the Rails Mafia
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool .NET developer. Seriously. Loves me some Microsoft development platform. Still, I’m not a pre-destined fossil; sometimes, I like to peek over the fence at what the neighbor kids are playing with. So, in doing my due diligence for an upcoming talk on ASP.NET MVC, I took a gander at the Ruby on Rails introductory demo vid yesterday.
Altogether, I was impressed by what I saw. In fact, it’s pretty clear from whom the ASP.NET MVC team has drawn their inspiration to free us from WebForms. A few minutes in, however, the nimble digits of the demonstrator dropped into a command line debugger. I thought this was funny, being that this is 2010, and relying on a one-dimensional stream of text to interact with software makes my jetpack sad. Naturally, I said so on Twitter, drawing the ire of a Rails fan who pushed up his glasses and charged. (I would say we engaged in a pretty friendly debate on GUI vs. CLI tooling, which is what actually happened, but where’s the imagery in that?)
Cut to this morning, at my desk, fresh hot chai in hand, ready to kick some ass. I pulled from Chrome’s history a URL that I had been referencing heavily for my task at hand, clicked said locator, and took a drag on my tea.
Spit take.
Take away this, if nothing else: There is a Ruby on Rails Mafia, and they will find you.
