Do Frameworks Spur Adoption Of Programming Languages? | Hacker News Reader

Do Frameworks Spur Adoption Of Programming Languages?

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Rails was certainly the killer app for Ruby in the English speaking world. Without that, it's chief fame would be as Perl-with-better-syntax utility goo in Japan.

I decided to learn it by writing a lexer for it in Lisp. Few pages into the spec I saw its objects are printed #<like this>. I was learning both Lisp and Ruby at the time, so I dismissed it as a Lisp with perl-syntax. That was in 2000 :-)

Never bothered to learn it still.

The reason I love Ruby is because I do consider it to be 'an acceptable Lisp.'

For extra fun, you can write really nice sexps in Ruby by just using arrays with a symbol as the first element...

    [:puts, [:+, 2, 3]]

I wrote a tiny compiler with an IR that did that. Stole the idea from http://www.hokstad.com/compiler

Ruby is nice in it's own right, it doesn't need to be an acceptable Lisp or an adequate Smalltalk.

If anything, Ruby teaches programmers to enjoy making software. It's awesome to see so much attention going into detail, and improving aesthetics. That's a good attitude to encourage.

Plus it's a bloody useful language to know.

What I mean is, I love Ruby because I see so much Lisp in it. Lisps are about the only languages more metaprogramming-enabled than Ruby is.

And the software engineering dedication certainly doesn't hurt.

Smalltalk?

I would not be a Rubyist if it wasn't for Rails. Well, maybe I would have eventually gotten around to learning it. But I learned Rails before I learned Ruby...

> I would not be a Rubyist if it wasn't for Rails. Well, maybe I would have eventually gotten around to learning it. But I learned Rails before I learned Ruby...

You're not the only one in that boat. Ruby is a great language in its own right — but with Perl & Python being so widely available, it really did need a killer app (Rails) to spur adoption.

I learnt Ruby because I was interested in Rails — I don't think I would have ever bothered (beyond a little dabbling) otherwise. It's not so much that I don't like to check out new languages, but having a pragmatic reason to do so helps significantly.

I think they just spur adoption of the framework.

Ruby didn't really catch on because of Rails. Rails did. There are a frightening amount of professional programmers who think Ruby is "a web language" or don't know the difference between Ruby and Rails.

Yes, Django has spurred a very large number of "new to Python" hackers. I was stunned by the number of "we got into python because of Django" people at Djangocon and PyCon in 2010.

I'd say affordable hosting for the masses above everything else. If I can't play with it, I won't code for it.

For mass adoption, yes.

However, with the advent of cheap VPS hosting, most of the people willing to try a new language/framework before it hits Drupal/Django/Rails momentum are perfectly capable of deploying sites. Everybody has a VPS nowadays, right?

Having a Heroku-equivalent or being built into shared hosting doesn't happen until you're nearly to critical mass.

Not sure everyone feels that way -- Rails took off plenty before there were any good hosting options, and I'd say Rails hosting is still harder/dearer than PHP (despite the awesomeness of Passenger/mod_rails).

Any particular reason that it's harder? With Passenger, the workflow is seemingly identical.

(That said, I use nginx/unicorn)

I was thinking of the unavailability of cheap shared web hosting (which I guess actually only justifies the 'dearer' part). And I may be out of date on that too...

As someone who's deployed a Sinatra app to shared web hosting a few days ago, no, that totally sucks.

But here's the thing: VPSes are so cheap now, I don't know why you'd ever go with shared hosting in this day and age. I don't have a job right now and I still haven't bothered to turn off my VPS, even though I don't use it... come to think of that, I should probably go log into the Rackspace console...

Absolutely. I love Linode! But when I was starting out with Rails my sysadmin skills wouldn't have been up to that, even if the VPS landscape had been the way it now is.

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