Why I chose Rails
May 4th, 2008
I resisted learning Ruby and Rails for a long time because I didn't want to learn another language. But the following facts made me change my mind.
- I enjoyed the expressiveness of Prototype, which is inspired by Ruby and mirrors the language fairly well.
- I had a choice of doing a project in PHP or Ruby and although I've used PHP before there was still a learning curve involved
- I tried PHP Cake, a framework based on rails, and liked how easy it was to get a database backed website running.
- Steve Yegge wrote an article that mentions how Ruby is displacing Perl, Python, and other scripting languages. He talks about how Ruby takes the best of list processing from Lisp, the best of OO from Smalltalk and other languages, the best of iterators from CLU, the best of Perl and pretty much the best of everything from everyone.
- I tried a 15 minute tutorial using an interactive ruby prompt in your browser and found it really easy to pick up.
- I tried a short Rails tutorial, Rolling with ruby on rails, and had a rails environment and a database website running in no time.
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