In Summer of 2006, I ‘ve interviewed Bruce Tate. We were discussing Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Bruce went over specific features of the language, and at the end of the interview, I ‘ve asked him if he could give me a pragmatic reason to switch to Ruby. I really like this Bruce ‘s phrase: “Whether or not it is Ruby, I teach all of my students to learn another language. The effort will make you a better programmer. ‘ Absolutely!

Derek Sivers, creator of the Web site cdbaby.com also states, “Rails was an amazing teacher. I loved it “s “do exactly as I say rdquo; paint-by-numbers framework that taught me some great guidelines.I love Ruby for making me really understand OOP. God, Ruby is so beautiful. I love you, Ruby.

But the main reason that any programmer learning any new language thinks the new language is SO much better than the old one is because he “s a better programmer now! ”

But being a good teacher seem to be the only compliment that Derek can give to Rails. His blog is called “7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails “. Derek spent two years with an excellent Rails developer re-writing 100K lines of PHP code and then abandoned this idea and returned back to PHP.

Rails is build on an excellent idea of convention over configuration, it allows you to create a working prototype of a CRUD application in minutes, map the code to the database tables that are named in a special way to simplify Rail ‘s job of objects ‘ persistence. But when the prototyping phase is over, and you need to program a commercial application, do you still enjoy the benefits of using Rails for development of this application?

Ruby has excellent language constructs, but the real world commercial applications require a language or a framework that can be grasped by a regular programmer, it should have good development tools, it should be secure, and completed applications have to perform well. Otherwise, you ‘ll get yet another great language like Smalltalk, which is used by a small group of loyal (and smart!) developers.

Derek lists seven reasons why he switched back from Rails to PHP. His last reason is this: “PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES ARE LIKE GIRLFRIENDS: THE NEW ONE IS BETTER BECAUSE *YOU* ARE BETTER “. I do not agree with this statement – the new girlfriend in rarely better than the old one. And Derek also went to a new one, learned some new positions, got familiar with this new lingerie , but then returned to his tried and true girlfriend called PHP. She does not wear Prada, but apparently, she knows how to do stuff.

It ‘s October of 2007, and my question remains the same, “What ‘s the main reason to use RoR for development of the real world enterprise applications? “