The KurtWerks Tinfoil Hat

[A. Khattri]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006, Kurt Wall wrote:

> So, BookScan indicates that more Ruby than Python books sold in
> December. That's totally congruent with "the new shiny thing" theory
> I maintain.

If there was a company (like say Sun), hyping something (like, say, Java)
to death then yes it would be a "shiny new thing" and all the media would
go on and on about it. But most of the talk about Rails has been from
developers playing with it, using it, building stuff, not from a marketing
droid. Big difference. There is no big company banging the Rails drum.
There's only one or two books on Rails and less than a handful on Ruby
(but I think that has a lot to with the lack of English language
documentation and the "not-invented-here" syndrome so prevalent in the
West).

> Rather, it's got a large
> mountain to climb before the installed base gets anywhere near that of
> "traditional" LAMP.

That's kind of stating the obvious. While Ruby has been around for 10
years or so (about the same as Python I think), Rails is relatively new
(1.0 just came out in December) so yeah it will be awhile before it
becomes more widely known but that doesn't mean it doesn't have a lot of
good ideas in it, put together in a well thought out way. Anyway it was
intriguing enough for an old fart like me to have a look.


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