Spare Me From Choices

I found a great presentation from Google Video about why too many choices is a bad thing. I couldn’t agree more. (Even this blog is named Too Many Choices 🙂 For me, Django (and Python) is about making less (and therefore better) choices.

Many web frameworks boast with the fact that they offer infinite choice of solutions for every possible problem. Whether the choice is about object-relational mapping, templating or whatever, more choices means added burden to the developer to choose the right one. With Rails less choice is “opinionated software“. With Django, it’s consistency, cohesion and perfectionism.

I love that fact that there is just one way of doing things (right). It’s easy to remember, it makes writing code faster, and it helps reading other peoples code.

For a much more better view on the paradox of choice, listen to this presentation given by Professor Barry Schwartz, April 2006. (There’s not very much visual info in the video. Just hit play and listen.)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/6ELAkV2fC-I

Why RoR Rocks

I haven’t done anything (sane) with Ruby, ever. I managed to install Locomotive (standalone RoR package for Mac OS X) on my PowerBook and make a blog app with scaffolding by reading trough some tutorial. Rails was one of the frameworks that our web development company considered moving to but after playing with it for a while and reading all the horror stories about deployment of rails apps we eventually went with Django.

Anyway, I love Ruby syntax and I’m sure that Rails is very good framework for many situations. The best thing about Rails, however, is the attitude. Mr. Hansson (the lead developer) has very clear vision of what Rails should be and also what it shouldn’t be. For me this is one of the strongest selling points of RoR. Too many Open Source projects end up being a really big mess when trying to serve everyones needs. I wish everything good for Ruby on Rails, and especially that it wouldn’t never become everybodys framework. We need attitude.