This is cool. I'd love to see more stories like this, a coder talks about what he does, instead the linkbait submissions that are taking over HN recently.
I'm kinda fed up with the idea PHP = beginner's stuff don't touch it (as I am a PHP developper).
True it is a very permissive language with a bunch of awkwardnesses, but that's the main point of using it.
Building something with a tiny LAMP stack is done in seconds, which can then be extended into something huge (think Facebook or Flickr). It's very extensible, you can add any stuff you like (frameworks, ...). Basically it's as if you start with a blank sheet of paper and decide where you want to go.
I don't know many programming languages allowing this.
In a sentence, he loved Rails, joined Muxtape despite it being written in PHP cause he believed in it, felt unproductive and missed Rails, so he took a day to rewrite in Rails.
it does seem a little backhanded to have rewritten the app in ruby and then passively alter opinion to use ruby. maybe that's better than aggressively trying to alter opinion?
one of the first django teams i was on after college had a guy who frustratedly rewrote our work in ruby. the rest of us were new to python, django and web apps in general, while he was more experienced, so he kind of missed the whole point about learning, mentoring and team work versus getting frustrated and wasting time.
this was a different situation, and is also just an anecdote. nonetheless, i couldn't help but cringe when i heard he'd rewritten the app in ruby without first consulting the team, even if just to say--look, i'm going to do this in my spare time as a learning experiment. i'll check in before it gets out. i appreciate ya'll's support.
Technical story? Well here it is: "I ported this small, simple band site from PHP to Rails in a day. My co-developers (this site has more than one?!) didn't understand at first but I brought them round".
I don't get this site Muxtape.com. I've seen it mentioned here a few times but I don't understand why it's "favoured".
It looks like a super-simple site where a few bands have uploaded some pictures and a couple of songs, which can be played by a flash player. Well, that's neat and all, I like the minimalist design, and mootools rocks, but, you know .. and?
I kept looking for some kind of advanced functionality. Since the domain name kind of sounds like "mixtape" I was clicking on the songs and trying to, you know, mix them. Nope - one at a time. Right. So where's the beef?
The guy says he ported to Ruby in one day, and I can believe that, since the DB design was already done and it looks like most of the work is in the layout and JS which could be just copied over into Rails.
So, can anyone enlighten me as to how this site, while nice for what it is, is special in some way such that "hackers" would care about its implementation especially?
He is talking about a site that it took one person one day to rewrite. Then he writes:
'''Ruby’s inheritance, metaprogramming, flexible mixins, and testing culture support a fantastically granular ecosystem of encapsulatable, interchangeable, combinable tools.'''
I would like to see his one line of ruby that replaces 20 lines of php. I am not saying that it is not possible but I am pretty sure that is more about abstraction than anything.
