[Seaside] another reason Rails gets market share andSeasidedoesn't

Blake blake at kingdomrpg.com
Fri Jul 20 21:35:40 UTC 2007


On Fri, 20 Jul 2007 08:19:56 -0700, Ron Teitelbaum <Ron at USMedRec.com>  
wrote:

> I've never really been able to counter those arguments and I've  
> experienced some of the downside.  I had a programmer that was just gaa  
> gaa over
> Borland's Delphi.  He really believed that it was the best possible gui
> development platform out there and really wanted me to let him build an
> application with it.

I'd say best available, depending on when, and as long as you're limited  
to Windows development, and concerned with a number of other issues Delphi  
handles very well.

> I relented and as you can probably guess we needed to support that  
> application after he moved on.  You are right that we were able to  
> support the application because of the quality of the developers, but
> even small changes required a large amount of tinkering and learning that
> would not have been necessary had I stuck to my guns and said no.

Ah, but how do you measure that against the additional time it would've  
taken for him to build the app using [some other tool]?

As one of the original Delphi users (beta tester and author for V1), it  
was intersting for me last year to find a company that had built an  
incredible application on it which showed exactly where the whole thing  
fell apart. These were smart guys who were using all the up-to-date design  
technologies they could leverage using Delphi, and yet as I looked at all  
the gyrations they had to go through, it became clear to me that none of  
these acrobatics would be necessary in Smalltalk.

On the other hand, no Smalltalk could have produced the UI that set them  
apart from their competitors without them also going into many unrelated  
businesses (like producing graphing components). Another thing they relied  
on was being able to perform zillions of calculations live based on the  
user's mouse drag (which caused the UI to redraw itself based on the new  
parameters). Java couldn't do it; I don't think there's a Smalltalk that  
could either.


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