Twitter Reportedly May Abandon Ruby On Rails 423
Raster Burn writes "According to TechCrunch, Twitter has plans to abandon Ruby on Rails after two years of scalability issues. Candidates to replace Rails are said to be PHP, Java, and Ruby without the Rails framework." The post links a brief comment (at 139 characters, probably a tweet) from Twitter founder Ev Williams saying it ain't so. The comments following the post embody the controversy over whether or not RoR sucks.
I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner (Score:5, Funny)
On an unrelated note, is anyone here good with hello world programs? Mine keeps crashing.
Re:I'm surprised they didn't do it sooner (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, because message queues and SMS gateways and email-parsing daemons just write themselves, freeing you up to belittle things on Slashdot!
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Twitter don't use Rails to handle most of that though, do they? I don't think drix is suggesting that they rewrite every piece of code they have, just the Rails portion.
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Grandparent asked "How complex can Twitter be on the inside?" Parent asserted that there's nothing more to it than a few database tables. Parent is ignorant, a jackass, or possibly an ignorant jackass.
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Rails is a Ghetto (Score:2)
http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html [zedshaw.com]
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Does anybody have a javascript snippet to automatically go back a page if the idiot who wrote the page you landed on has a horizontal scroll? I'm too lazy to write the two lines needed (actually you could probably do it in just an anchor tag).
Even though I didn't bother reading the page, It was in
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http://www.oreillymaker.com/link/6313/rails-is-bullshit/ [oreillymaker.com]
Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?
It's a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can't simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.
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Frankly, I think Twitter is doing the wrong thing here. Its a very rare case for the actual architecture of the program to inhibit performance. Usually, the bottlenecks occur in one or two suboptimal modules, that, when optimized, significantly increase program speed.
On the other hand, perhaps the bottlenecks are somewhere inside the Rails framework, and the Twitter team thinks that it'd be simpler to move to a new framework than to invest the effort to fix Rails.
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Re:Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be the crux of it, as I read it.
The rails framework is aptly named. Its like driving a train. You follow the rails. Its easy, simple, and those are its strengths. But if one day, you decide you want to cut across a field save a few hours of travel, well, you probably shouldn't have chosen 'train' as your mode of transportation.
The simpler and easier a framework is the harder it is to change its behaviour in ways the designers didn't expect. Its like using Microsofts web rendering controls in an application... they are drag and drop simple to use and that's great. But if you want to tweak them so they handle a particular css element in a different way [read standards compliant way], its not going to happen. The -best- you can hope for is to pre-parse the document to rewrite it in a way that the rendering control will get the appearance right, because you are NOT going to change the rendering behaviour itself easily. Better by far to just switch to a different rendering engine.
Conversely the more robust a framework is, and the more hooks they give you to inject/alter behavior, the more complicated and bug-prone it is to develop with.
Rails is a trade off... great when it fits what you need, abysmal when it doesn't. And rails in particular from what I've heard is especially frustrating when its 'oh-so-close-but-not-quite' what you need.
Examples? (Score:2)
Thanks.
Re:Examples? (Score:5, Interesting)
The framework operates a multiple levels. At the highest, a complete page can be generated from scaffold that automatically hook model to controller to view. I have found the scaffolds to be lack luster. From a completely database-centric view, there are some neat things that are automatically generated. For instance, verification methods in models are use to display errors on the page and mark input fields in red. My personal experience has found scaffolds to be lackluster.
Most well-designed applications revolve around the application's use, not its internal data representation. Using scaffold strongly ties the interface to data representation which creates the situation that "the user can be wrong." You see this in Microsoft Access databases where you can enter something in or choose options that are mutually exclusive. Because the application lets you see that data, the program generates an error if you are wrong. From what I have seen, the gripe is that the full scaffold is too specific and rigid. Well, duh?! That's the point of each layer of scaffold--to provide a guide for usage.
Personally, I have shunned most of the page scaffolding and tend to rely on creating my own use flow. I use the controllers to present that choices are possible and to manipulate the models as opposed to the common practice of having the controller just load a set of records and pass it to the view (which formats the output). The advantage is that the user is never wrong. Options that are logically inconsistent are never presented. Add to this the ability to monkey-patch (the extension of predefined classes) and lambdas, the code is clean and concise. Both can be used to refactor procedural code into functional code and move it out of the controllers and models. Most importantly, the design allows you to think about what you want to manipulate and then after the fact extend the functionality. A common example of the is the statement:
1.day.from_now
The numeric class is extended in Rails so that you do not have find and use a static date class, but can state simply the desired result.
So, where does it fail miserably? So far, I have not found any great place that it does. It performs as well I need it to serve about a dozen users on a lowly Pentium 4 machine with 256 megs of RAM. So far, the application has been 99% maintenance free. A date verification package I am using had a Feb 29th bug in it. The cool thing is that since I can see the source, I could fixed it. Perhaps there are issues with scaling, but from what I understand, the system was designed around a non-centric design. In theory, a correctly designed application should be able scale horizontally.
Given that there are other high-profile, high-use web sites written in Rails that do not suffer from Twitter's issues, I am left thinking that its failure in general looking for a specific reason. Rails has been very stable and easy to extend, but then I write for maintenance and ignore hype.
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That would be an incorrect assumption. I was actually referring to a winforms web browser control:
e.g.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2te2y1x6.aspx [microsoft.com]
This is a control that takes an url or webpage as input and renders it in a control. Its basically an embeddable web browser. And of course it relies on the Internet Explorer (Trident) rendering engine. I use them, for example,
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That said, I don't really think that clean architecture and speed are orthogonal goals. Frameworks like Rails add overhead because they are general - they allow you to do all sorts of things on top of them, and still support all those things even when you're only using
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For development, you bet it is. For production, I'd rather pay developers to work on a faster platform than have to purchase and manage five times more hardware just to make the thing scale. The "hardware is cheap" argument runs hollow when you start literally running out of data center space all because the software is crap.
Re:Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
On the other hand, if you spend all day pondering the ultimate architecture, you'll never ship and if you do you won't meet requirements. Learning where those tradeoffs are is all about experience and is why the engineers with over a decade of real world experience earn more.
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I prefer: use "architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain" until it starts to fly, then rewrite crucial parts as in "speed, memory, and response time at all cost"
It's not rocket sience really.
all those frameworks help
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What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?
It's a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can't simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.
This position presents a false dichotomy: a choice between achieving passable performance through good design, versus optimizing for developer efficiency. Efficient use of resources and ease of development are not mutually exclusive -- why should they be?
When developers say "Hardware is cheap" in response to poor architectural choices, what they're really saying is that "Our hardware costs are externalized".
This has little to do with "speed, memory, and response time at all cost", and everything to do with
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This argument is relevant. I cannot speak for twitter but I have seen many a company develop a poor architecture in-house, experience poor results, rewrite the whole thing at great cost, and blame the technology instead of the architecture for political reasons. It's an easier sell to the CEO to ask for the rewrite when the blame game is targeting someone who can't defend himself.
There is some confusion here about the issue. The post here seems to be about performance whereas the original article refere
Re:Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never seen anything saying otherwise.
Follow any of these sets of rules:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization [c2.com]
http://schwern.org/~schwern/talks/What_Works/What_Works/slide016.html [schwern.org]
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jch/java/rules.html [cmu.edu]
Or my version--
1) Don't optimize, no really, don't.
2) If you absolutely have to, write it unoptimized, test it, write it optimized, then:
2a) If the first is anywhere in the ballpark, throw away the second,
2b) If the second has enough of a proven, documented speed gain to get you past some accept/no accept barrier, comment out the slower one, but keep it so the next guy can follow the "Good" code.
If you don't document exactly what you did in the code and why, I'm going to refactor it into something readable the second I see it.
Also--know how to program. Choosing a linked list instead of an array list for an insertion sort is just programming correctly. It's not an optimization.
-1 offtopic... Just wanted to help the parent out with his cow-orker.
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I was expecting some actual explanation, but this just reasserted the point without any support. A sort of blog spam I suppose, but I guess no more obnoxious than all those "trackbacks" and "pingbacks".
Most JMS systems use a database for a message store. So does MQSeries. Big Erlang apps also tend to use a database like MNesia, but I'll admit that's a different sort of thing, and it's also fully distributed.
Come to think, Erlang's a right nice candid
"Probably" a tweet? (Score:2)
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Ruby Can't Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
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QED! QED! You go man!
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"I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!"
"Only the true Messiah denies His divinity!"
"What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me?"
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Of course, by then, they're committed, both in development time and emotionally to the project. It's hard to
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Re:Ruby Can't Scale (Score:4, Informative)
Please refrain from commenting when you don't know what you're talking about. The desire to stir up a flamewar is not sufficient justification.
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If the language were a problem, then Ruby without Rails wouldn't be an option, now would it? Think about that, genius.
And actually, I'm not a ruby developer. Nice try though.
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So. Since rails isn't thread safe you have to use a process model where one process handles one request. Now these ruby processes can get up to 100MB in ram (depending on application). That means it takes 100MB to post a comment, display a page,etc.. This is an extremely unforgiving environment when you are trying to scale. There are many scenarios where just a little extra i/o w
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Using memcached to cache, among other things, ActiveRecord objects instead of always hitting the database has been a common practice for people using Rails (and lots of other frameworks, Ruby and otherwise) for years. So, AFAICT, you're just plain wrong here. Now, it may be a
Hype vs. reality... again. (Score:5, Insightful)
Rails was the cat's pajamas two years ago. The future. The in-thing. Revolutionary. Exciting. Radical. Amazing!
Then like so many similar times before, reality set in. It turned out to be buggy, unstable, less performant, and heavily dependant upon an evangelical base.
Ruby the language is interesting. Not my personal cuppa, but I have nothing against it. Rails, however... After having analyzed it and developed a prototype application for my company, I came to realize that there are other frameworks out there that are more worthwhile, epecially in an enterprise environment. The problems I've seen Twitter experience only solidify this.
If you are doing green-field development Rails should probably not be your first choice. Yes, Rails is interesting. No, it is not the end-all-be-all, and it certainly has some rather major warts.
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Rails has its share of issues -- deployment is way complex, performance sucks, and the community can be rabid in the same unscientific, emotional ways -- but buggy and unstable? Come now, that's disingenuous.
When Twitter opened it was handling 11,000 requests per second and doing it well. Twitter has gone from nothing to sensational in a ver
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When Twitter opened it was handling 11,000 requests per second and doing it well. Twitter has gone from nothing to sensational in a very small amount of time. If you hit the ground running that quickly, your growing pains will be evident regardless of what framework or language choice you're using.
That I'm going to have to disagree with you on. For starters the most recent troubles that have plagued Twitter happened as recently as a few days ago. They have had plenty of time to mature their stack, but th
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I feel like it's important to note that, most often, "hype" is not "just hype".
What I mean is, lots of things in life are over-hyped, but the hype usually comes from somewhere. There is something within the over-hyped thing that people are genuinely excited about, impressed with, or desirous of. They may have trouble explaining the true source of their excitement, but if you can find that source of excitement, you'll usually find something worthwhile.
So although Rails was over-hyped by some people, we m
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Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
The original statement? (Score:2)
Abandon Ruby on Rails? (Score:2)
twitter (Score:2)
The problem is ruby (Score:4, Interesting)
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The problem is the database (Score:3, Informative)
MatzRuby 1.8 is somewhat slow, but it does proportionality very little work compared to the MySQL and Memcached back end. Quite frankly, I've never seen a performance profile of a Rails site where Ruby was the problem; it's almost always the database, or too many AR queri
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Rails Gives Fast Development, Not High Performance (Score:2, Interesting)
Rails remains the best way to develop solid and maintainable web apps. But it will not compete with C for speed. Once you understand your business process, and have developed a mature algorithm to make the business work, there is nothing wrong with writi
I saw it on the Internets, it's true (Score:2, Insightful)
So, er... TechCrunch says "multiple sources claim that Twitter is abandoning RoR."
The guy who founded Twitter says, "no, not really."
And TechCrunch says, "but we have MULTIPLE SOURCES."
Guess what? I have MULTIPLE SOURCES that say the Earth is flat!
Must be a slow news day.
Evan Williams Denies It (Score:2)
Yes, in fact, RoR DOES suck (WARNING: RANT.) (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste
Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files from the distribution into the app directory it creates. How do you upgrade? Painfully, that's how. I have numerous small applications that break when I upgrade rails and it's dependencies because the copied files don't work with the newer version. My applications should be 100% code I write directly. Everything else should be kept separate and accessed via includes so emerge/apt/yum/gem dependencies can keep the rails code compatible with itself and I never have to "fix" code I didn't write.
2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time.
So you set up a RAILS app, create your database table, and run 'generate' to get your pseudo-MVC (seen #4 below). You've got everything you need to edit a single table via the web, but that's not even close to an application. It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. It should be able to create an app that supports validation (both JS and server-side for obvious stuff like numeric and lengths), sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. It could do this just from the information available in the database metadata, which would get you 90% done. And a huge number of simple apps could be completed simply by writing a custom CSS skin and adding some graphics.
3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development.
Most of what rails does buy you is the back-end stuff. It's an easy way to get stared with ActiveRecord, which does the heavy SQL lifting. AR, the one shining gem of RoR, is a great object-relational model and I believe it is responsible for 99% of RoR's popularity. But SQL isn't that complicated in the first place. The real tough part of web development is getting rich, graphical, reusable UI components that work across web browsers. Prototype/Scriptaculous are a wonderful starting place, but I need code that I can feed an AR class (and possibly a list of columns and/or related tables+columns) that will generate cross-browser compatible HTML view of the table complete with searching, sorting, filtering, and paging. There could be functions/objects that render it as a table, a list, a tree, etc. You're probably thinking I should just use
4) It's NOT MVC
The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. Views subscribe to a model, get their data and then do their thing without worrying about other views. If some other view changes the model, the controller notifies all other subscribed views of the change. Rails MVC is something totally different that doesn't solve the same problem. Rails does provide data validation via AR, which is part of true MVC, but it still misses the point of MVC, which is a coherent and always up to date set of views into the model. In fact, an MVC is impossible to implement over the web because communication is one way: the browser must initiate all communication with the web server. (For those that don't "get" this,
Groovy on Grails instead? (Score:3, Interesting)
Grails is very similar to Rails, but is not a straight port -- more "inspired by," as it's described by its proponents. Grails also doesn't have the problem that Rails has in terms of scalability and performance, since it's built on Groovy/Java (which have a real threading model). No screwing around with creating a zillion Mongrel instances to scale your site, etc. And if you don't care to use the built-in web server that comes with Grails, you can have the Grails framework generate a WAR file which you can deploy in any container like Tomcat or Jboss.
At a recent 3-day Grails training session taught by Scott Davis, I was surprised to hear that some major corporations have jumped on the Groovy/Grails bandwagon, including Mutual of Omaha. For a conservative company to make that kind of leap says something. (Furthermore, they used to be a COBOL shop -- the rationale appears to be that it's easier to get COBOL programmers to make the leap to Groovy first, then switch slowly to Java, as opposed to migrating directly to Java.)
After that 3-day training, I was pretty impressed. The biggest win for Grails seems to be rapid development and deployment, but all the other stuff you get for free in the package makes it something you'd like to stick with. I'd say the thing that most impressed me with Grails was GORM, which makes Hibernate even easier to work with. GORM spoils me, since it obviates the need to write SQL most of the time.
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Re:What is Twitter? (Score:4, Insightful)
For a medium to large site they should consider using servlets and java and avoid J2EE.
For a very large site I would recommend C/C++ and maybe java if they have the budget for hardware.
The toughest part is getting developers that can code webapps (not just CGIs) in C/C++ (while easy to do C/C++ developers overall are hard to find and are not as cheap as ruby/perl/python ones and even java ones; this is from experience of trying to hire them). So they should check their developer base and see what is the fastest language they feel very comfortable with and go with it. From experience they may have to settle for java since that will provide them a large pool to pick developers from and the learning curve is slightly less steep than C/C++.
I suspect they fell into the trap of building a demo fast using RoR and then just going with it into production, I have seen this way too many times unfortunately.
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A modern C++ library that takes an abstract layout description and creates browser-specific HTML to match that description would be a very cool thing. A C++ library that merely generates "standard HTML, verified by the W
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Re:Follow the script (Score:4, Insightful)
And indeed, your experience differs a lot from that of thousands of web developers. Perl in particular had been called the Duct Tape of the Internet.
Speaking of Perl, I notice that your complaint it is not that it's slow, but that it's hard to support. That's a legitimate complaint, but it says nothing about the relative efficiency of scripting languages.
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Have you tried PHP? I hear it runs several [yahoo.com] high [wikipedia.org] load [facebook.com] websites [digg.com] ;-)
Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What is Twitter? (Score:4, Funny)
In my day, we had talk, finger, vi, and elm and we never complained! Green vt100 terminals were all anyone really needed! Get off of my lawn!
Seriously, talk had advantages over IM. You actually could see what the other person typed as they typed it, including backspaces...
And finger worked great. I knew a nerd that had his
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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ICQ actually offered a "chat session" feature that did that. but it required direct client-client connection which made many people (me included) abandon it. Also it apparently had fairly high network overhead.
I tend to think being able to compose your thoughts before letting the other end see them is probablly a good thing anyway.
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Re:What is Twitter? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Informative)
You can twitter from your cell or PC.
I think it is one of the most usless things on the face of the earth but it seems popular for some strange reason.
Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Most popular things are useless.
Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah, like cars, telephones, computers radios, houses, food, utensils, tools, books, clothing, water, the internet...
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If flesh and blood humans exhibit this kind of bigotry, what chance do we all have when the robot insurrection comes?
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It depends on what you use it for. For what I use it for [twitter.com] it's quite useless but if you're into notifying groups of friends what you happen to be doing and want it to be delivered by their preferred method of receiving that information, then it's great.
I want to tell 10+ people that I'm going away for the weekend and I don't want to deal with two SMSs, three e-mails, four IMs and one phone call
Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless you are claiming there are a substantial percentage of folks who use twitter but don't use email. I'll want citations for that though, because I don't believe it for a minute.
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Re:What is Twitter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, all of these free social networking services have figured out how to monetize it.
Twitter is the honeypot to collect a group of users. After a density of users is reached, larger communication companies will start looking at purchasing Twitter so they can "integrate" their service. Nevermind that integrating a free service with an available API doesn't require purchase.
What the larger company is actually doing is buying customers.
From the TOS:
It's the web 2.0 business model, all coated in a lovely veneer of altruistic "doing it for the love of geekiness" bullshit.
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Notice though before you get your knickers in a knot.
"I think it is one of the most useless things on the face of the earth."
I didn't say, "It is one of the most useless things on the face of the earth."
My statment is without question factual since that is how I feel about it. If you find it useful we
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According to Penny-Arcade: (Score:5, Informative)
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Ah yes, twitter users are create at expelling excrement.
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What is Twitter and why is it significant that they are abandoning it as opposed to anyone else?
It's a service to announce to your friends what you're having for dinner, how satisfying your bowel movements are, and whether or not you intend to see the hip concert that is happening next week in your neighborhood.
It's the blog without the content, the conversation without the words, the letter to a friend without the feeling, and the kiss goodnight without the tongue.
As for the significance of them allegedly leaving RoR, that's anyone's guess. Probably to incite more PHP vs. RoR battles on /.
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***
Re:There's a whole monty python sketch for this sh (Score:2)
Isn't that what we do here?
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Re:There's a whole monty python sketch for this sh (Score:4, Funny)
What's better? (Score:2)
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Then it wouldn't be a troll now would it?
Seriously, OK. What is a "better" language? Its hard to say exactly. For web sites, there is a subtle difference between the need for mere "scripting" on top of a database (like a CMS or something) and more extensive software development.
I guess, PHP is good enough for scripting and Java useful for more extensive development (as a rule of thumb, not a law), but don't ignore the utility of C/
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Pretty much anything that can be done in Java can be done in PHP5. The problem with PHP is that most of the literature on PHP is written in PHP3 style, which is utterly 1997, predates
With PHP 4.3 and higher, you can do your OO programming and wrap your objects into classes, however most PHP books treat OO and classes as if they were radi
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With PHP 4.3 and higher, you can do your OO programming and wrap your objects into classes, however most PHP books treat OO and classes as if they were radioactive. Blame the authors of many PHP books for being stuck in the PHP3 mindset and passing on bad/archaic programming an
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It's not just slashdot. Idiot.
(is joke ha ha)
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Ruby is not just beautiful, but great.
Rails is just making bad publicity for Ruby.