I Love Ruby On Rails

For about six months now I’ve worked in a few other programming languages. Played a little in Go, and a lot in ASP.NET/C# for work.

Go is a pretty neat language. I like how simple it is. I really like that you can compile a binary, deploy it to a server, and run it. Really simple. It also compiles really, really fast. Fantastically fast.

I’ve only done a little bit in Go and I hope to do more in the future. I think it would be really great for an API behind an Angular or other type of JavaScript web app.

Now ASP.NET and C#.

First problem I have with it is that I have to run Windows. As you guys probably know I’m not a fan of the Windows operating system. I used Windows 1, 2, and 3 way back in the day. But soon as OS/2 came out I was done with Windows. After that I went to Linux in 1995. I haven’t looked back at Windows since. Although I did do a 10 year stint on Mac OS X. It was great at first, but that’s a whole other story.

Second problem is that I’m working on an old code base that has mutated over the years to its current state. C# isn’t too bad, but learning it while Shaving Yaks isn’t the ideal way to appreciate a language. I love my co-workers (if you’re reading this) and I understand how the cruft builds up when you aren’t given time to go back and tidy up.

I’m starting to understand Visual Studio a little but there is a lot of hidden switches in there. I’m not a fan. I’ve done most of my work in Sublime Text 3 just because I’m more used to how the editor works. Of course it works differently on Windows. And there is Resharper for Visual Studio that gives you a lot of goodness. It’s just too bad the IDE feels so clunky and slow.

Recently I got the chance to do some work in my old pal Ruby on Rails. I have to tell ya it’s a world of difference. It’s so easy to spin up a project. Even easy to spin up an existing project. And the language is so nice to use. It is nice to get back to interpreted vs compiled. No more waiting for the app to compile before I can see stuff in the browser. Although I do wish there was the option to compile Ruby into a binary.

I’m looking forward to doing some more work in Ruby on Rails. I do enjoy it very much.