The power of readable metaprogramming

The power of readable metaprogramming.

Oliver Steele is Chief Software Architect at Laszlo Systems and he’s digging into Ruby on Rails:

During
my last vacation it took about five lazy vacation days with Ruby on
Rails to implement a fairly sophisticated 40-page web application with
five models, two metamodels, CRUD, cookies,
image upload, and login. (I’ll write more about the application itself,
if I find a few free weekends to harden it for public use.) For
comparison, it took me about the same amount of time during my previous
vacation to write a much simpler ten-page PHP web application that had only one model. And I already knew a little bit of PHP, whereas I was learning Ruby and Rails from scratch.

He
explains how much of this productivity stems from the fact that
“…Ruby is one of the rare languages with a readable embedded syntax
for metaprogramming”, which in turn “…lets the library user write in
a concise domain-specific language that embeds Ruby”. The unique power
that gives us Associations and Validations.

I’m
really glad that Oliver looked into Rails because that has in turn lead
me to really dig into Lazlo. It looks pretty darn neat! I’d definitely
love to see someone do a Rails backend with a Lazlo frontend. 
[Riding Rails]

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