Industry Misinterpretations 45: Who was that Masked Man?
This week, we sat down to compare Smalltalk and Ruby - and, as usual, we wandered all over the map - including excursions into general syntax issues, Lisp, and XML. Other than a lost comment stolen from Michael by Skype, it went pretty well.
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Enclosures:
[http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/audio/2007/industry_misinterpretations-07-23-07.mp3 ( Size: 12960363 )]
Comments
Ruby... you'll be disappointed!
[Rowan Bunning] July 24, 2007 18:58:26.065
Nice podcast guys. It seemed well expressed and coherent plus some disagreement and debate was interesting to listen to.
This is actually quite timely for me as I attended a Ruby on Rails workshop on the weekend. Interestingly, the trainer is a former Smalltalker and when I introduced myself and revealed that I work with Smalltalk his response was "Well you'll be disappointed!" The #1 disappointment we discussed was the lack of a rich IDE but, as you guys note in the podcast, the Ruby way is quite nice and certainly comfortable for anyone used to working in a Linux/UNIX environment where the command-line is king.
Generally Ruby on Rails seems very appealing if all you want to do is knock out a MVC web app that baby sits a database - it does that rather well. Smalltalk can also do that very well but we currently lack the complete stack packaging, equivalent of Ruby's scaffolding scripts and possibly most importantly for newbies - clear doco and tutorials on how to quickly put together a neat web app with Smalltalk. I have heard that something along these lines is on the road map for Cincom Smalltalk. I think that a Rails equivalent in Smalltalk could have a big impact if packaged and promoted the right way.